Via Media
by DeGlace
Summary: "I bet you're a vegetarian," said Temari, and she plucked at a nearby plant. "Here's a leaf for you, try not to choke." It all went downhill from there... One road. Two bunkhouses. Three weeks of border patrol. Neji x Temari.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** I rediscovered this after having forgotten that I'd written it a while ago. It's a light-hearted and more than slightly absurd Neji x Temari. Some of the jokes are tired but reading this again still made me laugh a couple of times.

Mentions of Kankuro/Tenten interactions are a nod to "Little Green Leaf" by Ninja-Shen, the ultimate crack pairing fic. ("It's like so crack it's canon!" – a nonexistent critic with an aptitude for vacuous, yet pithy, slogans.)

A note on the title, _via media_ is Latin for "middle road," which is rather appropriate, as you will soon discover.

VVVVVV

Once upon a time, when feudal lords were at peace and the ninja world was quite happily not wading ankle-deep in blood, a little-used road ran from the windswept deserts of Suna through to the thick forests of Konoha.

It was little-used because any ninja needing to travel from Sand to Leaf or Leaf to Sand preferred the far more cinematographically-impressive travel method of leaping through trees with their arms flapping uselessly behind them but, alas, this story is not about velocity streamlining or the dynamics of canopy-level sprinting, so let us merely reiterate that this road was little-used by the local ninja.

It was occasionally used by traders, farmers and other such civilian types out for a cross-border stroll. Well, 'occasionally' might be too generous – let us say, infrequently, because after all, the good citizens of Leaf didn't willingly go to the godforsaken sun-baked wasteland that was Suna, and the good citizens of Sand didn't willingly go to the godforsaken mosquito-infested bogland that was Konoha.

This road had the peculiar geographical feature of running right along the Sand and Leaf border for a short distance, which meant that if you laid yourself across it – if ever the fancy took you, and you looked both ways before doing it – you could touch the dusty ground of Suna with your fingertips while your toes wiggled in the loam of Konoha on the other side. For some reason this did not become the huge tourist attraction it might have been, possibly because the road was barely paved, dusty, and its crevices were inhabited by scorpions and other equally poisonous creatures like Rosie O'Donnell.

That particular area was also of some interest meteorologically in that it could be pouring rain on the Leaf side while the Sand side, two metres away across the road, remained absolutely dry. On the other hand, there could be a raging sandstorm on the Suna side while on the Konoha side trees swayed slowly in breezy tranquility. An interesting little road, all in all.

Unfortunately our two protagonists, as you will soon find out, this road was _the_ road when it came to official cross-border activities and the Rules and Regulations of both Sand and Leaf stipulated very precisely that there had to be AT ALL TIMES (it was actually written in capitals which is why it was taken so seriously – see _Rules and Regulations section A.2.v. 67 carry the three, twice removed_) a Jounin-level ninja on patrol at the twin guardhouses which flanked the road.

_Rules and Regulations section A.2.v. 67 carry the three, twice removed_ imposed this military presence on the part of both villages to ensure that anybody stupid enough to try to smuggle anything (hard drugs, cigarettes, best-selling authors, Elvis) by way of the road instead of the far more convenient dark, pathless, unsupervised forest was immediately taken to a mental health clinic for an assessment and a free brochure.

_Rules and Regulations section A.2.v. 67 carry the three, twice removed_ specified also that border duty was to last for the duration of three weeks exactly and not a day more, lest the ninjas on duty went crazy from the sheer boredom of it and voluntarily checked _themselves_ into the mental health clinic clamouring for the free brochure.

_Rules and Regulations section A.2.v. 67 carry the three, twice removed_ was why, on this particularly bright summer morning, a very disgruntled Temari was dragging her fan, her pack and a black cloud of Fuming Wrath towards the bunkhouse on the Sand side of the road.

It was also why, on the same sunny morn, a cool, collected Neji was making his graceful way towards the Leaf bunkhouse carrying an aura of Assured Nonchalance and Immovable Stoicism and a pack full of Armani suits – that is, practical ninja gear.

Though their arrivals were seconds apart and their respective bunkhouses were across the road from each other, both Neji and Temari studiously ignored one another, as was the custom of ninja of strong character who were planning to vie for the title of Most Badass While On Border Duty shortly.

Both pushed open their respective bunkhouse doors open and disappeared.


	2. Chapter 2

VVVVVV

Temari stalked into the Sand bunkhouse, took one whiff and exclaimed, "Yoko must have had border duty before me. I _hate_ his cologne." She then tossed her pack onto the bed, whipped out a can of air freshener and began to spray it generously upon everything that stood still long enough in her immediate vicinity.

Today was, Temari reflected angrily, not her day.

She had successfully avoided border duty for months by way of various nefarious means (up to and including lewd acts with squadron leaders). But some insufferable do-gooder somewhere in the Suna administration had pointed out to the Kazekage that not having his sister do border duty looked something like favouritism and that was really unacceptable to everyone, including the insufferable do-gooder (whose border duty was, incidentally, supposed to start on this particular day). Needless to say, when Temari found out who the do-gooder was she was going to be laying some iron fan smackdown on his do-gooding ass.

So. Here Temari was, spitting nails because she had missed what would have been a fun mission to Mist which _everyone knew_ was going to degenerate into a week-long bar-hopping spree because the ninja land's new motto was "make love, not kunai-embedded corpses". And how was it fair that she had to do freaking _border duty_ when Mist was opening a new club specializing in blue-skinned male dancers in buttless chaps? What_ever_!

Temari proceeded to take stock of her entertainment inventory for the next three weeks – three weeks which seemed unbearably long, considering that only twelve seconds had elapsed and four paragraphs had been produced within that brief time-span – and so she inverted her bag onto the bed and shook it vigorously.

In theory, one was not supposed to bring distractions while on border duty, because border duty entailed actual patrolling and surveying the area and things, you know – but in practice, most ninja brought along something other than spare undies.

Out of Temari's pack tumbled some bland foodstuffs, a few paperbacks, the newest edition of Killer Kunoichi ("The Only Magazine for the Serious Female Ninja"), and some other girly magazines that she would never admit to reading, much less owning, much less subscribing to.

Out tumbled also her fan maintenance supplies which consisted of one (1) jar of polish, one (1) steel wool scrubber, anti-rust spray, various protective coatings in their squishy tubes, a screwdriver with 15 different heads, a crowbar, nuts and bolts, a sharpener for maintaining that razor edge and a trio of polishing rags she called Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. All yours for the low low price of 19.95 plus shipping and handling!

Temari scooped up all of the items not strictly related to ninja-ing and dumped them under a loose floorboard which had seen far worse than cheap paperbacks and girly mags. This floorboard had seen a two-page spread of Tsunade in the June 1977 edition of Playboy for chrissakes. So anyway, under the floorboard went the non-essentials and on the shelves went the bland foodstuffs and the fan maintenance paraphernalia.

Temari presently snatched her fan and wandered back outside to at least _pretend_ to be watching the road for a while – fifteen minutes would do. Well okay, ten. Maybe five.

Once outside, Temari hitched up her skirt and scrambled onto a conveniently-placed boulder from where she had a fine view of the road as it curved its way into the dense Konoha forest, and an equally fine view of the far more spectacular – in her opinion – Suna side of endless desert and the hard line of the horizon pressing against a perpetually blue sky.

Temari also had a fine view of the Leaf bunkhouse on the other side of the road but it couldn't possibly hold her any interest for her: she had other more important concerns to address, such as staring into the distance and thinking about buttless chaps.

Buttless chaps could only occupy her for so long, however, and once Temari had determined to buy enough buttless chaps for her all-male Suna squadron and reflected on the difficulty of saying "buttless chaps" ten times quickly under her breath and decided that The Buttless Chaps made a very witty name for a rock band assuming they were British so they wouldn't sound stupid saying 'right-o, chaps,' which would totally be their catchphrase, her attention drifted back to the Leaf bunkhouse whose door happened to be opening at precisely that instant.

Out stepped some Leaf chick in a white outfit with a dark skirt thing around her waist and long black hair. Temari spared her a quick look then tossed her head and reflected that the chick had nothing on her fab style – white kimono pyjamas or fishnet? You be the judge – plus the chick was like, totally flat-chested.

Temari gave the girl a patronizing smile from her boulder and turned to concentrate on the road in a way that said, "this desolate, dusty, empty stretch of road is infinitely more interesting to stare at than you are".

To Temari's dismay, the girl did not wander over to dispute this but sat on a large log as equally conveniently placed as Temari's boulder and turned to look down the Suna side of the road in a way that said "I am too cool and collected to react to your petty provocations."

This infuriated Temari, but she nevertheless – very good-naturedly, she thought – resisted the urge to inform the Leaf chick that she walked like a man.

After an hour of silence during which absolutely nothing happened, Temari was desperate to fetch some reading material but she did not want to be the first to break down and leave her post – that had now become a matter of personal honour because chicky on the other side was being all holier-than-thou and actually doing her job for some reason. "Typical Leaf nerd!" thought Temari.

To occupy herself, Temari began to open and close her fan to make sure its hinges were in good working order.

This exercise had the added benefit of making a highly irritating repetitive sound, which could never be a bad thing when some goody-goody Leaf was sitting across the road, staring at it like it was incredibly fascinating when everyone knew she was actually bored out of her mind and just trying to look hardcore.

Temari accordingly snapped her fan open and closed.

Click – snap.

Click – snap.

Click – snap.

The sound resonated delightfully in the still air.

Click – snap.

Click – squeak – snap.

"Oho," thought Temari. Some maintenance was required here.

Click – squeak – snap.

Yes, definitely a squeak. Third hinge down?

Click – squeak – snap.

Nope, not third hinge. Second?

Click – squeak – snap.

No! It was not the second hinge at all but one of the bolts!

Click – squeak – snap.

One of the bolts! _Horrors!_

Click – squeak – snap.

Click – squeak – snap.

Yep, one of the bolts.

Click – squeak –

"Excuse me."

Temari stopped her mechanical movements and looked around for the man who had spoken.

"I'm here."

Temari followed the sound of the voice and found, to her horror, that it was emerging from the vocal chords of the long-haired skirt-wearing Leaf girl across the road.

"Oh my god!" thought Temari, "a transvestite ninja! And it's coming this way!"

Temari bravely held her ground and closed her fan with a final snap while The Man-thing stepped towards her.

"I would really appreciate it," it said, "if you would stop making that noise." Then it turned and walked back towards its log.

"Oh," said Temari. "I didn't realize it was disturbing you."

"I also did not realize that you are a man," she added when The Man-thing said nothing.

The Man-thing turned and looked at Temari and Temari realized to her even greater horror that _it had no pupils_.

"I also did not realize that you are blind," Temari said kindly after it stared at her for some time. "I forgive you for ignoring me."

"I am not blind," it said, and hanging at the end of that statement was an unspoken addition: "you imbecilic nincompoop."

Temari was stung by this unspoken and uncalled for remark. "Whatever. So what do they call you, besides The Man-thing?" she asked in the most cordial tones she could muster.

"…Neji." It said in a very cool and collected way before returning to its log in a cool and collected fashion.

Temari watched it – well, ok, _him_ – sit back down. "I'm Temari, since you asked."

Since she had ascertained that this was indeed a specimen of the male gender, Temari gave this Neji guy a Once Over, one intense look from the polished Leaf headband to the sandaled feet during which she quickly calculated his shoulder-width to hip ratio, gauged his Manliness, and estimated his endurance level, his muscle mass, his BMI and his aptitude at poker.

Temari narrowed her eyes and made the Once Over a Twice Over by scanning him back up from the sandaled feet to the headband. There was something familiar about the guy, too, but she couldn't quite place him. In any case, she found this Neji fellow to be quite satisfactory in all categories except for Manliness; he was quite masculine in _build_ now that she looked at him properly but there was something vaguely androgynous about his fine features and that too-silky hair.

"Well," Temari said to herself, "I'll pass him with an A minus since his voice is a pleasing baritone."

Unbeknownst to her, Temari was herself the object of a Once Over far more penetrating than that she had subjected Neji to because the Once Over Neji was giving _her_ told him exactly what she had had for breakfast (that is, an egg salad sandwich and two double-stuff oreos) as well as her hip-to-waist ratio, the shape of her legs, her bone density, her risk of anaemia, her cup size, the health of her chakra system and the fact that she had had her appendix removed three years ago. Happily, Temari passed in all categories, though Neji found her to be too bold-faced in front of himself, the heir apparent of an extravagantly rich clan with a killer bloodline and fabulous good looks. Also, what was up with the hair?

When Neji made no response to what was, by Temari's standards, a very polite introductory conversation, Temari labelled him a hardass. No matter, she told herself. She knew how to deal with the hardass type: her little brother Gaara was, after all, not _a_ hardass but _the_ hardass, bitch, and it's Mr. Hardass to you.

Temari lifted herself off of her boulder – no sense in keeping up the personal honour fight now that the ice had been broken so skilfully by her smooth rhetoric and gentle manners – and made her way to her bunkhouse to find the latest issue of Killer Kunoichi.

Temari re-emerged a few moments later clutching Killer Kunoichi and sat reading with her back to the Neji twit, absorbed by the article entitled "Femme Fatale: Inaccessible Ideal Or Overused Stereotype?".

She was then engrossed by a personality quiz, "What Your Weapon of Choice Says About You" and found that her oversized metallic fan indicated that she was, quote, "an overbearing bitch of a kunoichi and frankly we're surprised nobody has killed you yet."

Temari shook with rage momentarily then took the test again and cheated so that her result was a far more pleasing "your weapon indicates that you are a shining example of womanly grace and feminine wiles." Granted, the weapon was "empty tampon box" but that was okay, feminine wiles, yeah! Sexy!

Temari paused to consider how exactly one would go about using an empty tampon box as a weapon and was just indulging in a delightful fantasy wherein she vigorously shoved tampon boxes into every available orifice of do-gooder Sand administrators when a sudden gust of wind lifted her magazine clean off of her knees and blew it until it flapped half-heartedly across the road into Leaf territory.

Temari gasped as she watched her meagre source of entertainment defect to enemy lines. Maybe it was mad at her for cheating on the quiz. In any case the fact remained that her magazine was now waving its glossy pages weakly in the Konoha breeze and not the Suna one.

"That," said Temari out loud, "is unacceptable."

The Neji twit was looking determinedly in the opposite direction and seemed to be pointedly ignoring Temari's dire situation, so Temari took matters into her own hands and walked briskly across the road to retrieve her property and perhaps hang it for treason.

"Don't take another step," came a voice when Temari's heel hovered one inch above Leaf ground. "That's Konoha territory."

"Um," said Temari to Neji's back, "how did you know I was here? Don't tell me you have creepy hyper-ears or something. Anyway, I just want to pick this up."

"I said, don't take another step," came Neji's voice again when Temari made to swing forwards.

"Fine!" Temari spat, "…uptight Leaf pouf with nothing better to do," and she reached over with her fan instead to drag the freakin' magazine towards her. She made a dangerous lean forward – the lean was dangerous not because she was at risk of falling but because anyone who was looking towards her would get a full view of her cleavage, no worries though, the guy was facing the other way – and scooped the magazine towards her with her fan after much vociferating and tearing of formerly glossy pages.

Meanwhile, thanks to his Byakugan, Neji got an eyeful and it made him rather hot and bothered.

When Temari finally had her prized magazine in her hands she found she had managed to severely damage most of the articles she hadn't yet read, which was absolutely unforgivable and _someone_ was going to pay. Temari tried to salvage what she could but the one article she had really been anticipating, "The Long and Short of it: Kunai vs. Katana (in his pants)" was nigh-illegible.

Unbearably frustrated, Temari stalked across the road and returned to her boulder with vengeance on the brain.

After stewing in her anger for a few moments, Temari turned to look casually at the Neji to determine whether any of his personal effects would be at risk of blowing onto her side, at which point she would be sure to accidentally trample over them and smack them repeatedly with her fan, but he had nothing with him on his ugly log, the rule-abiding schnook.

Temari turned her back to Neji with a huff and started to do what she was supposed to have been doing since her arrival, that is to watch the road with a fierce concentration, which she did for approximately five seconds before she drifted into considerable concentration and then to reasonable concentration and then to limited concentration where she reached a plateau and remained, transfixed, for the next eight hours.

And there we will leave her for today.


	3. Chapter 3

VVVVVV

The next day was even more uneventful than the former because neither ninja wanted to be the one to open a conversation (Temari thought she had done her part with the preliminary introductions and Neji, well, he didn't give a damn) and the only moderately interesting happening was the spontaneous migration of a colony of red ants from Suna to Konoha. Temari observed them with great interest and considered asking them for their passports and immigration documents but by the time she had decided to do so, they had disappeared in the undergrowth on the other side of the road, so she could only hope that they would nest under Neji's log and bite him.

On the third day things started out as usual: Temari nursed a death wish from the sheer dullness of the place and Neji did his job with the unwavering intentness of a professional jounin.

"Jounin, yeah, okay," Temari thought with an eyeroll, "more like mega-nerd oh my god get a life maybe?" Besides, she told herself rather severely, she was a jounin too and it didn't mean that she was going to pretend that all of this was somehow interesting or important.

Temari returned to her paperback (_The Adventures of Norman the Nudist Ninja_) and immersed herself in the gory death by flossing of the protagonist. Good, she hated him anyway, because she was jealous that her name prohibited her from being a nudist. She could only be Temari the Terror or something. Temari the Torturer, the Terrible, the Tyrant, the Tormenter. What_ever_.

Temari was presently distracted by a sound from across the road. Woah! The Neji twit was actually up and moving around. Temari dropped her book and watched as Neji lifted up the log upon which he habitually sat. Perhaps the ants _had_ settled there after all. Temari rejoiced internally and hoped that Neji would do some sort of entertaining dance when he realized that he had ants in his kimono.

Unfortunately no such dance materialized, Neji merely pressed the log forcefully into the ground so that it stood firmly on its end and made for quite a passable training block. He then began to assault the log with various hand strikes and kicks which all looked the same to Temari but were nevertheless somewhat impressive.

Temari watched him train for a few minutes and wondered if she should train too and show off her hot moves, but she could not muster the energy to do so and so she settled, to Neji's great chagrin, on making a running commentary on his training.

"The Leaf jounin has entered the arena," Temari announced. "The log is quivering in fear."

"The Leaf is now smacking his palms repeatedly on the log in an attempt to, we can only assume, dislodge some bugs and eat them."

"He has now progressed to kicks, demonstrating great prowess at knee jabs but producing a slightly wobbly roundhouse."

"The Leaf is now playing air guitar."

"He is now back to using his hands and he is making seals which I do not recognize but – HEY! Was that a middle finger?"

Temari drew herself to her full height on her boulder, grasped her fan and shot Neji a withering glare. "_Was_ it?"

Neji turned to look at Temari with an equally withering look rendered all the more unsettling because the freak didn't have pupils. "Maybe," he finally said rather anticlimactically.

Temari wondered vaguely whether challenging Neji to a fight would constitute a breach in the Sand-Leaf treaty. Yes, she decided, it probably would. But inviting him to train with her wouldn't, right? Right.

"What do you say," Temari said in the most innocuous manner she could, "we train with each other?" If she accidentally decapitated him, she would blame it on the ants.

"No," came the toneless answer immediately, and Neji turned back to his log and resumed his fist-smacking.

Temari was not used to being turned down quite so abruptly and so she sat back down, ruminated for a while and finally muttered, "wuss."

Neji's back stiffened noticeably at this affront but he kept on training and did not favour her with a response.

Temari retreated temporarily to her bunkhouse to fetch her fan maintenance gear and returned to her rock where she proceeded with the burnishing of her fan.

She was careful to make the strokes as long as possible and allow for as much irritating squeaking as she could – which was, in truth, quite a remarkable amount; when she worked the cloth particularly hard the sound was somewhat reminiscent of a troupe of mole rats bathing in hydrochloric acid.

Temari kept up her delightful squeaky symphonies throughout the afternoon and late into the evening until a tight-jawed Neji asked her whether she was planning on continuing throughout the night or only until she drove him to a homicidal rage, to which she answered graciously, "only until you agree to train with me, you frigid clod."

To which he responded, "fine. Tomorrow. Try not to die or something."

And there we leave them for tonight.


	4. Chapter 4

VVVVVV

Temari leapt eagerly from her bunk the next morning, which was unusual because she was absolutely not a morning person, in fact, she was not even a late morning person or a somewhere-around-noon person or even a person at all – no wait – well, in any case, she was not prone to gleeful leaps out of bed at ungodly hours like 10:00am but that is what happened on _this_ morning because today she actually had something to look forward to that wasn't Norman the Nudist or bugs: training with that dipstick Neji and hopefully leaving him some bruises to remember her by.

Temari's plans were momentarily postponed by the unannounced arrival of Kankuro, her dear puppet-wielding, makeup-wearing, margarine-eating brother (who, to this day, can't believe it's not butter).

Kankuro burst into Temari's bunkhouse without knocking, providing a fine illustration of his family's celebrated civility and manners. Thankfully, Temari was eating breakfast at this point and not doing anything embarrassing like flouncing around naked and re-enacting Norman's latest escapades because she would totally lock the door before she did that.

"Hey hey hey," was Kankuro's greeting as he swiped Temari's carefully prepared cheez-whiz sandwich. "I'm on a mission – D rank, god can you believe this – and thought I'd drop by to see my favourite sis. How goes border duty?"

The siblings made their way outside – well, Kankuro made his way outside chased by Temari who wanted her sandwich back – and resumed their conversation when the issue of contention had been settled in that Kankuro managed to drop the sandwich and then Temari didn't want to eat it any more.

Kankuro ate the dusty sandwich and looked across the road to where Neji stood with his arms folded across his chest staring down the Konoha side. "So," Kankuro munched, "who's your partner in Loserville?"

"He's Neji, but I call him a knob, mostly." said Temari. "He's blind. Also deaf-mute."

"Wow," said Kankuro. "Isn't he one of them – uh…"

"Who?" Temari turned to study Neji's profile more closely, "I knew he looked familiar but…"

"– Leaf guys?"

"No shit!" said Temari, and she thanked Kankuro for this dazzling flash of the obvious.

"Well okay…" Kankuro examined Neji with growing interest. "He does look familiar. Chuunin exam-familiar."

"Oh… now we're getting somewhere." Temari nodded slowly. "The only thing I remember from that was my blowing that one chick out of the water. Tintin or something."

"Tintin? Naw, that's like a Belgian comic about that reporter with the hair."

"Tonton? Nope, that's someone's pet piggy… Tenten!"

"Tenten! Yeah! She was pretty hot for a Leaf." Kankuro chewed silently for a moment before he added slyly, "I liked her buns."

"Which buns, now?" Temari asked with a wink. They both burst out laughing in a highly un-ninjalike manner.

"I'm _so_ going to look her up next time I'm in Konoha," Kankuro stated and he whipped out his Very Secret Hit List notebook, adding Tenten to the two names there (the others were, in case the reader is curious, Cher and Wonder Woman). "So anyway, back to Mysterio over there."

Both Sand nin turned to look at the straight-backed figure across the road.

"You know what," said Temari after a few moments of contemplation, "he's got to be from one of those old Konoha clans. But not the shadow clan – Shikamaru's – now _there's_ a hot Leaf for you – or the fat guy clan…"

"Or the crazy mind-swapin' time-warpin' sizzlin' blonde bombshell clan…"

"There was that one with the eyes." Temari stated after both had furrowed their brows in silent consternation.

"Yeah but his eyes went red and freaky and then he like, ran away with the pedophile."

"No – not that one – the x-ray vision thing – remember? That one short chick with the black hair? She had eyes like him! I remember!"

"Oh yeah! And she had a nice rack!"

"Ok… ok… I'm remembering this… their family name started with an H…" said Temari, "and they were prone to melodramatic flashbacks…"

"H-Ha-something something? Harvey's?"

"That's a fast food chain."

"Herpes?"

"Mayb–"

"It's Hyuuga," Neji said flatly from his post across the road while struggling to contain the Palmstrike O' Death (TM).

"Hyuuga! Yeah!" the Sand siblings exclaimed, pleased with themselves.

"Mystery solved," said Kankuro cheerily. "Now I'm off to clean out a barn."

Temari reflected that perhaps border duty wasn't all that bad. "Have fun wading knee-deep in manure," she answered, "I'll think of you."

"You do that. Thanks for the sandwich. It was pretty gross."

Then Kankuro was off swinging through trees with his arms dangling uselessly behind him while the camera provided all onlookers with panoramic sweeps of the forest with occasional zooming in on Kankuro's face as he muttered barn-cleaning strategies to himself.

Back at the bunkhouses, Temari sat on her boulder and reflected that she didn't actually know what her own last name was, and that kind of sucked.

She shared this thought with Neji who responded that it was probably a result of her peasant ancestry. Temari let him know that her ancestry was studded with Kazekages like he had _no idea_ and she also informed him that he was henceforth to refer to her as "princess," which he refused to do with offensive rapidity.

"So anyway," said Temari after she had made herself a new cheez-whiz sandwich and eaten it and found it kind of gross, "we were supposed to train together today."

"Yes…" said Neji rather unenthusiastically.

"Let's lay down some ground rules." said Temari, "one: we aim to incapacitate and not to kill."

"Does putting you a coma for the next two and a half weeks count as incapacitation?" Neji asked very seriously.

"…No," said Temari after she had considered it. "Because I'll look like a corpse and that's, like, the same thing as being dead. Duh."

"Rule number two," Temari continued, "we're going to have to fight on the road and keep on it, too, because that's no-man's land–"

"– or woman's"

"– or woman's-land, and besides the Leaf side is totally a swamp and it would ruin my shoes."

"Fair enough," said Neji.

"Also, let's not use special killer jutsus or anything because if I used mine I would get another nasty letter from those hippies at the Konoha forestry department for damaging their trees. Anything else I'm not thinking about?"

"No," said Neji, who was nefariously planning to put Temari in a coma for at least twenty four hours, "let's go."

They circled and had at each other on the narrow stretch of road for a few minutes before they determined that their fighting styles were completely antithetical to one another's, which was kind of dumb, because it meant that Temari back-pedalled madly most of the time to keep Neji in range of her fan while Neji pushed forwards furiously to get her in range of his Eight Trigrams.

"This is stupid," said Temari finally when both were moderately sweaty and neither had managed to land any real hits.

"It was your dumb idea," Neji pointed out in mid-lunge. "If you would just _stand still _–"

"I don't think so –" Temari side-stepped neatly and aimed a vicious blow at the back of Neji's head with her still-folded fan, which he blocked just as neatly.

"How could you have _seen_ that?" Temari asked incredulously. "There is no way –"

Temari interrupted herself to gasp in horror. "Oh my god!" she cried.

"What?" Neji asked while edging sneakily closer.

"Do you have problems with high blood pressure?" Temari enquired apprehensively before she swung her fan murderously towards him.

"No…" said Neji, ducking swiftly and grabbing the fan with an internal promise not to let go until he had flung it far away.

"Because your face has gone all weird and veiny," Temari said with her usual delicacy while she yanked forcefully at her fan.

"That would be," Neji explained patiently without relinquishing his grasp on the fan, "the Byakugan. My bloodline limit. Stupid."

"Oh yeah…" Temari said before snapping her fan open, forcing Neji to release it and narrowly missing his groin with its razor edge. She whirled the fan above her head while considering Neji with a critical eye. "It's ugly."

"It's _useful_," said Neji defensively while thanking the hokages past and present for the reflexive dodge that had allowed him to keep the family jewels intact.

"Like _how?_" asked Temari.

"Like I can see that you have a weird scar-tissue build-up in your left lung. You should get that checked."

Temari was scandalized by this revelation of a very personal nature. "If you must know," she said, "I inhaled a shuriken when I was twelve, okay?"

Temari slapped her fan around a quickly-dodging Neji a couple of times and added, "don't be Byakugan-ing people without permission. It's not manners."

"Hold," said Neji suddenly, "somebody's coming."

Both nin froze temporarily, then spilt to their respective sides and sat looking coolly and collectedly at a figure detaching itself from the gloom of the Konoha forest.

"Hello, good morning! Cheer and youth to all," said the figure, which on closer inspection revealed itself to be a young man in a green outfit sporting orange leg-warmers, "beautiful day, isn't it?"

Temari was immediately suspicious of him because he was so happy. "Please declare any weapons, drugs, lawyers and/or military vehicles you may have concealed on your person," she demanded imperiously.

"Oh," said the man, "I am not here to cross the border but merely to greet my Hyuuga team-mate with the Effusion of Youth he has probably been missing sorely."

"Oh," said Temari. "Then please continue. Your hair is fascinating."

"Thank you very much," said the man in green politely and he turned towards where Neji sat facing the Sand desert resolutely.

Temari watched the man go with narrowed eyes because she had just recognized him as the guy who had almost beaten Gaara at the chuunin exams whose name was Crotch Lee or something.

Temari wondered if she should hold a grudge against him for that but decided, very magnanimously she thought, that with a name like Crotch he could be forgiven for his past misdeeds.

Temari watched the two Leaf ninja converse, or rather one converse while the other looked anywhere but at him and seemed pretty annoyed. She caught such interesting phrases as "Gai-sensei," "new training regimen," "everlasting youthful vigour" and "Viagra".

Crotch Lee then shook Neji's hand with a tearful "I knew you would approve of our idea with so much youthful enthusiasm!" and turned to make his way back down the Leaf road, declaring in passing to Temari: "I will now drag myself back to Konoha using only my teeth!" which he presently began to do.

Temari watched him inch away on his stomach.

"Maybe," she suggested to Neji, "you should warn him about the scorpions."

"If you warn him about the scorpions," said Neji, "I'll kill you."

"Fair enough," said Temari, and together they watched Lee haul himself by the teeth around the bend of the road and into the Konoha forest.

VVVVVV

**A/N: **The rest will be up in smaller instalments lest I alienate everybody with enormous amounts of chapter spam.

This is the first pairing I've written where the protagonists don't have to try and kill each other on sight. Still comfortably in the realm of crack, though. The best place to be!


	5. Chapter 5

VVVVVV

On the fifth day, Temari finished all of her reading materials.

On the sixth day, she cleaned her fan until it looked new and she briefly considered selling it for several times what she had purchased it for so as to finance her buttless chaps expedition.

On the seventh day, Temari stopped the work that she was doing on her fan and saw that it was Good. "Let there be light," she muttered, and then the sun exploded. (Genesis 2.2) (Or somewhere thereabouts.)

On the eighth day, Temari rose at 6:38am and rolled out of bed without doing her usual morning _toilette_ because she wanted to beat Neji to the job for once.

Unfortunately, as Temari discovered when she emerged from her bunkhouse (sporting a splendidly fluffy bed-head) it turned out that Neji had been awake since 5:00am, the nerd.

"You are a nerd," Temari informed Neji pleasantly in the pre-dawn gloom before sauntering to her boulder and sitting rather provocatively with her fan between her legs.

"You," said Neji evenly from his log, "look like you stuck a fork in a toaster. What is up with your hair."

Temari chafed because Neji's insult ranked higher than hers on the burn scale and was probably more accurate. "What_ever_. Go back to whatever you were doing – making Pantene commercials – prissy berk –"

Temari turned her unbrushed head dismissively and faced her beloved desert with great aplomb. At this early hour the sun was just swinging clear of the horizon and lifting with steady majesty upwards into the fragile blue sky, spilling its radiance across the flat desert to make it beautiful, strange and new –

"Douche."

"Excuse me," said Temari to Neji very severely, "you have just interrupted my pastoral dalliance. Kindly keep your comments to yourself."

Temari flipped open her fan and held it between herself and the Neji twit while she turned back to the horizon. Where was she? Oh, yes. The sun climbed higher and its rays turned from mild to fierce in the cloudless firmament and with it also rose the chatter and rustling of desert creatures and the silent kingdom of Sand at dawn was transformed into one of song and life…

Temari floated in a state of transcendent rapture until she realized she had skipped breakfast, at which point she went to her bunkhouse to rectify that oversight.

"Don't you ever eat?" Temari called around a spoonful of organic yogurt in the general direction of Neji when she re-emerged from her bunkhouse.

When Neji ignored her, Temari meandered towards his log. "That wasn't a rhetorical question."

"No," said Neji when he couldn't ignore Temari studiously licking her spoon in his face, "but it was a stupid one."

Temari's countenance darkened dangerously at this and she sucked on her spoon with slow deliberation while considering which limb of Neji's to amputate.

"I bet you're a vegetarian," she finally said, and she plucked at a nearby plant. "Here's a leaf for you, try not to choke."

Temari then drifted back to her boulder. Neji watched the leaf settle on his knee with a punitive glare and the leaf curled upon itself in fear before spontaneously combusting.

Neji then directed his glare towards Temari in the hopes that she too would combust, but she only snapped her fan open and shut at him with a vaguely menacing air before she got up and began overturning rocks for no apparent reason.

Neji brushed the leaf's ashy remains off of his knee very coolly and collectedly and he turned to face the Konoha forest because it was far cooler to watch Temari while pretending not to be watching Temari.

Before Neji could activate his Byakugan, however, an expertly-thrown empty pot of organic yogurt bounced off of the back of his head.

Neji turned slowly to look at Temari with thoughts of violent retaliation adding a deadly glint to his eyes. "What," he asked, "was that for?"

"I hereby challenge Leaf to a fight," said Temari, "with _this_."

Between her index and her thumb Temari held the tail of a very confused little black scorpion who had been happily chilling under a rock until a monstrous hand had come and abducted him.

When Neji looked at Temari blankly (which was, come to think of it, how he always looked at her), she prompted him gently, thus:

"So go find a bug, you doorknob."

When Neji did not move, Temari shrugged and whispered confidently to her squirming scorpion, "I guess he forfeits. Sand prevails yet again."

Neji could not resist such a provocation to his village's honour and so he activated his Byakugan in the most nonchalant manner possible and began to scan the area for the largest insect he could find on his side – which was, we note in passing, a far more stylish method of locating insects than rummaging under rocks.

He eventually located an enormous stag beetle which was peaceably wandering upside down on a nearby branch. Neji fetched it without much difficulty and returned to find that Temari had scooped out a shallow pit in the middle of the roadway to serve as an arena.

"To the death?" Neji asked, clutching his beetle and trying to remain cool and collected as it pinched his thumb quite fiercely.

Temari resisted the urge to cry "no, to the pain!" and assented.

They placed their respective insects ("a scorpion is not an insect, it's an arachnid," Neji sniffed) in the shallow pit.

"Sand, represent!" Temari cried as she dropped her scorpion.

When the creatures became aware of each others' presence, the beetle snapped its mandibles threateningly and the scorpion began to circle slowly with its claws and stinger raised. It was all extremely dramatic and Temari observed with baited breath while Neji watched with feigned indifference.

Then Neji's beetle rolled over a few times and stopped moving. Temari's scorpion started to skitter around it in hysterical circles until it noticed that nothing was happening, at which point, much to Temari's vexation, it started to burrow.

"My scorpion is a pacifist, I guess," said Temari a little sadly when all that could be seen of her scorpion was its tail end and some legs.

The beetle was still not moving. Neji tried to prod it but Temari stayed his hand with a cry of "no interference!"

"Is it dead?" Temari asked hopefully after Neji's beetle had remained unmoving for a few minutes.

"I think it's sleeping," Neji said doubtfully.

Finally, the beetle roused itself, wandered towards the half-buried scorpion, clambered onto it and started moving in a peculiar rhythmic manner.

"Um," said Neji.

"Why," asked Temari, "is your beetle mating with my scorpion?"

They watched, mesmerized at the cross-species hanky-panky.

Both highly professional, _very_ mature elite jounin were squatting low, intently absorbed by the proceedings when Hinata Hyuuga emerged from the Konoha forest and made her slow, uncertain way towards them, bearing a large basket emblazoned with the Hyuuga crest.

"Ano…" said Hinata when she was near enough and nobody paid attention to her.

Temari looked up immediately and said, "you must be mistaken, there is nobody called Ano around here."

Meanwhile Neji had hurriedly risen and was brushing himself off, resuming his cool and collected manner and looking haughtily down at his cousin like he had totally _not_ just been watching interspecies bug pornography.

"Ano… I meant… ano…" Hinata looked imploringly at Neji, who was busy Byakuganingly scanning the contents of the basket she had brought and finding that someone had forgotten the artichoke hearts again. They _always_ forgot.

Neji finally came to Hinata's aid by informing Temari that she was his cousin.

"Oh," Temari said kindly to Hinata, "I am sorry that you have a speech disorder. Have you seen a specialist in phoniatrics?"

Hinata promptly fainted, at which point Neji snatched the basket and went to stash it in his bunkhouse like the insensitive prat he was.

Temari felt slightly sorry for the girl and so she proceeded to try to revive her by chaffing her wrists, and when that didn't work she dangled the scorpion above Hinata's face, which made Hinata come around pretty fast.

"Hi," said Temari as nicely as she could. "What's your name?"

"Ano…" said Hinata, sitting up and pressing her forefingers together in confusion.

"Hello, Ano," said Temari politely. "I remember you from the chuunin exams. What are you doing with your hands, is that a seal?"

Hinata shook her head, put her hands in her pockets and stared at the floor in mortification.

Temari could tell that this Ano chick was tense – she had, like, a sixth sense about these things – and so to break the ice she said, "my brother thinks that you have a nice rack."

This kindly statement did not have the desired relaxing effect, however: it caused Hinata to faint partially until she realized that Temari was still dangling her scorpion, at which point she chose to blush fiercely to an alarming shade of red instead.

"Hmm," said Temari perceptively, "your coloring seems a little off. I was just telling your brother –"

"C-cousin…"

"Whatever – your family seems to have issues with high blood pressure. You should get that checked."

Temari made to pat Hinata's arm kindly, but unfortunately used the hand that still held the scorpion, which sent Hinata screaming for the Konoha hills.

"Wait! Wait!" called Temari, sprinting after her. "I have some advice to give you!"

Hinata halted, turned apprehensively and waited for Temari to catch her breath.

"Never," Temari panted, "ever, google yourself. That is all."

Temari closed one eye knowingly and gave Hinata an encouraging slap on the back before turning back towards her boulder. Hinata stuttered her thanks for this invaluable gem of wisdom and departed.

When Temari returned she found Neji staring her down rather angrily from his side of the road.

"What?" Temari asked, but she didn't bother to stay for Neji's response because she realized that she had left her jar of fan polish open in her bunkhouse and it had probably all evaporated by now and it was pretty expensive stuff so she had to go and close it. She was breathless for lack of commas during such a lengthy thought.

Temari poked her spiky head back out of her bunkhouse two seconds later because she couldn't find the lid in there so consequently it must be outside.

Neji was still looking at her angrily from across the road, which made Temari pause and ask him if he didn't perhaps have the lid of her fan polish jar wedged up his ass or something, because she was looking for it and maybe that was why he was looking so pissed.

"No," said Neji in the most steady voice he could muster after having been suspected and accused of such inane behaviour. "I'm pissed because my cousin – who thinks I'm god – just caught me watching bugs having sex and it's all your fault."

"That," said Temari, who had just found the lid stuck to the other side of her fan, "is totally untrue."

"_How_ is it untrue?"

"Scorpions aren't bugs. _Obviously_." said Temari dismissively while trying to unstick the lid from the metalwork. "You told me that."

Neji chewed on this for a moment before he rephrased his claim: "My cousin caught me watching an arachnid and an insect having sex and it's all your fault."

"Well," said Temari, "at least now she knows you're straight."

"… Okay," said Neji, who stopped asking questions when Temari stopped making sense.

Meanwhile, Temari was having real issues getting the lid off of her fan, which was possibly why she had stopped making sense: the polish residue on the lid had partially dried and congealed into a gooey substance approaching the consistency and stickiness of glue and it was stubbornly refusing to come off.

Eventually Temari screamed at the lid in frustration and called it all sorts of mean-spirited names, not the least of which was "buttcrack," and she went to fetch her handy crowbar (you will recall it was available with her other accessories for the low low price of 19.95, our lines are still open folks!).

Upon her return, Temari shoved the crowbar sharply between the sticky lid and the surface of her fan. After several womanly grunts and all of Temari's body weight pressing down on the crowbar, the lid finally unstuck with a squelch and was propelled into the air by the force of her prying.

Both Temari and Neji watched the lid make a graceful arc, flip in slow motion and fall earthwards in the direction of Neji's head, and Neji dodged it at the last possible second for added coolness.

Unfortunately for him, however, his gorgeous hair flipped up and caught the gooey lid with a graceful swish.

All was silent for a few moments until Temari said, "whoops."

Neji looked sideways at the new ornament hanging in his otherwise perfect silky hair and he radiated a Serious Painful Death Intent at Temari. He shook his head in an attempt to dislodge it but it only became more entangled as the hair wrapped around the sticky lid.

"Try using this," said Temari generously, handing Neji her crowbar.

Neji rejected Temari's kind offer by wordlessly turning his back to her and proceeding to try to untangle his hair with his fingers.

"Don't touch it with your hands because I think that stuff is, like, corrosive or something in those quantities," Temari helpfully told Neji's back, at which point Neji turned around and released a torrent of very robust swearing in Temari's direction, which was hurtful because it had totally been an accident.

Temari tried to make amends by offering such intelligent suggestions as "I think if you put peanut butter in it, it'll come off" until she remembered that that was for gum and Neji informed her that he was severely allergic to peanut butter in any case.

Temari then suggested ice because that worked for gum too and when you really thought about the chemical constituents of both substances, gum was almost the same thing as fan polish because both had the element of Sticky in their quantum molecular substructures.

Neji could think of nothing better and so he stalked to his Leaf bunkhouse and fetched ice from his mini-fridge (which Hinata had conveniently smuggled to him in the basket along with salmon caviar and Portobello mushrooms) and handed it to Temari saying, "if anyone is losing a hand to corrosive fan polish it's you" and Temari thought that was fair enough considering the circumstances and so she began to gingerly apply ice to the knotted area of Neji's hair.

Temari wondered if it was possible to catch hypothermia and die by holding ice because it was extremely cold, but she suffered in silence because Neji was glaring kunai at her as she worked the ice into the goo surrounding the lid. Eventually some of it solidified, which meant that Temari could press flakes of it off and release some strands of hair, which was excellent news for all concerned.

She triumphed slightly too early, however, because in trying to flake off a particularly large chunk she found that it was still sticky in its centre, at which point she decided not to move her hand so that Neji wouldn't notice the fact that she had just managed to tangle more hair into it.

Neji noticed that Temari had stopped moving and said, "now what, you incompetent nitwit."

This wounded Temari, so she slid her remaining ice down his shirt in revenge.

A brief scuffle followed wherein Neji wriggled in agony (in a very manlike, stoic way) and Temari tried to follow his movements so as to not yank his hair.

At this point, both ninja became aware that there was somebody coming around the bend in the road whose clothing bulged suspiciously. The man stopped at the sight of Neji and Temari engaging in their strange dance.

"Hi," said Temari to save Neji's face, "I'm just checking him for lice."

Temari then noticed the man's suspicious bulges and, in as professional a manner as she could considering her bizarre situation, said "please declare what items you have on your person."

The man paused momentarily and then began to spout an interesting list of items including hard drugs, cigarettes, best-selling authors and Elvis as well as two F-16 jets, a Victoria's Secret catalogue and Sasuke.

Neji reflected bitterly that the one time someone was actually trying to smuggle some crap out, he was unable to do his job properly. He shared this thought with Temari in a furious undertone while Temari wondered what the hell a Sasuke was.

Temari considered Neji's point but noted fairly to him that the man wasn't actually trying to smuggle anything since he had declared it all, and so they resolved to let him go, not that they had much choice in the matter.

"Please go on, and have a nice day," said Temari.

When the man passed by them he gave them a last odd look and then handed them each a free brochure for the nearest mental health clinic. Temari thanked him graciously and Neji wanted to cry.

Eventually Temari was able to work the lid out of Neji's hair after some more ice and more yanking and more savage swearing by both parties.

Neji kept up a constant stream of death threats under his breath during the last pull and Temari asked him if he was reciting poetry or something, to which he answered loudly, "I am going to kill you," which Temari didn't find very poetic at all.

Temari noted in passing that, by the way, she was taller than he was and so she should be the boss around here, which made Neji stand up very straight indeed to demonstrate that he was taller – which he was, by half an inch, and plus, as he pointed out, Temari was wearing heels.

The truth of this made Temari change the subject, and she did so by asking Neji if he had brushed his teeth recently, which was very insulting to Neji who maintained a scrupulous oral health regime and so he punished Temari by breathing annoyingly in her face until she was finished and she breathed back loudly until she almost hyperventilated and then they stopped because it looked like they were engaging in weird erotic pseudo-asphyxiation foreplay or something.

Finally the lid fell out, the polish globs were (mostly) removed from Neji's hair and peace fell once again on the little road between two bunkhouses on the border of Sand and Leaf.

VVVVVV

**A/N:** Who caught the_ Princess Bride_ reference? Own up, don't be shy!

I might as well mention now that there are embedded within this fic a wealth of allusions to veritable myriad of random things ranging from _Waiting for Godot_ to Mark Twain to a fake dub of a Spongebob episode to a French & Saunders sketch to _The Wind in the Willows_ to Stephen Leacock. Collect all 200 references and win a free mug.

Thank you to the princely few who have reviewed thus far, I can only commend you for your fine perception of aesthetic quality and your superb sense of humour (ha). I propose a toast! All I have is a carton of apple juice but who cares! To your healths, and your excellent taste. Cheers!


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N: **A general 'FYI': I am not actively writing/working on any fic at the moment. _Via Media_ has been written in its entirety (it was, in fact, finished late last year) and I'm just updating as I feel like it. So no, this fic is not 'replacing' my other ones or stealing my time or hogging my writing energy. (That is the purview of the lifeforce-sapping entity that is university, and it's doing a damn fine job all by itself.)

Onwards!

VVVVVV

On the ninth day, Temari did not show up to her post at her usual time. Neji attributed this to laziness and thought nothing more about it until lunch time rolled around and there had still been no movement from the bunkhouse across the road.

Being Neji and thus being utterly inconsiderate when it came to privacy, he activated his Byakugan and took a look at the Sand bunkhouse. He could make out Temari curled up on the bed and, since it was now early afternoon, this was absolutely unacceptable behaviour for a ninja, so Neji resolved to awaken Temari with a loud shout right in her ear.

Neji accordingly made his cool and collected way across the road to the Sand bunkhouse. When he pushed open the door in a very sneaky silent manner, he found Temari curled up on her bunk shivering like a cold kitten, clutching a hot water bottle to her stomach and looking very grimly at him.

"Go away," said Temari. "I'm dying."

Neji was mildly concerned at this statement because if she died, he would totally get blamed for it.

"Why?" he asked.

Temari explained in a muffled way that she had a stomach ache and requested that Neji please leave before she killed him.

Neji, who was too oblivious to pick up on Temari's hints, tried to be helpful by looking at the contents of her stomach. There he found a partially-digested granola bar and some milk. "Maybe the milk was sour," he reflected aloud.

"Um," said Temari. "Please stop doing that."

Then Neji scanned a little lower – by _accident_ okay – and he noticed that Temari's uterus was totally eating itself up and rolling bloody uterine lining around in a very unappetizing manner.

"Oh," Neji said tactfully, "no wonder you were being so bitchy."

At this point Temari lost all patience with Neji and she grasped her fan and, with an unbelievably swift sweep her arm and a cry of "I'll give you bitchy, you tosspot!" she blew Neji the hell out of her bunkhouse.

And Neji, when he picked himself up twenty feet from the door a few moments later, resolved to throw raw meat into that freaking tigress' den before he actually entered himself, in future.

Then Neji sat on his log for three hours with his Byakugan on and he watched the road and the forest and the desert and the Wind chick who was curled up on her bed in a really pathetic way.

He tried not to feel sorry for Temari but he did anyway, which was kind of weird but he guessed it was because when she was being dead _in there_, it meant she wasn't _out here_, generally making a moron of herself, which resulted in him having nothing to do, really.

Which meant that, in terms of semantics, Neji did not actually feel sorry for her but rather for himself, which he liked much better anyway because that was closer to the usual state of things.

Then Neji felt a little bad because Temari stayed unmoving for the rest of the afternoon and that was a bit excessive in his opinion, especially since he was so devastatingly bored that he was on the point of challenging himself to another bug fight.

When evening fell, Neji resolved to pay Temari another visit, but first went to fetch a can of tuna (because he didn't have raw meat) which he waved inside of the door of her bunkhouse before he poked his head cautiously around the doorframe.

Temari was looking at him like he was mentally defective, which cheered Neji considerably since this too was closer to the usual state of things.

"Why," Temari asked, "are you waving a can of tuna at me?"

"So that you would have something to bite that wasn't me," said Neji.

Temari considered this and told him that she would rather bite him in any case since biting the can would totally break one of her fillings. This made sense when Neji thought about it and so he wisely kept his distance from Temari's teeth.

Temari then stuffed her face in her pillow and muttered miserably that she had forgotten her Midol at home like an idiot.

"Yes," said Neji, who thought that agreeing with Temari for once might cheer her up a little, "you are an idiot."

Temari gave him a fierce glare and said very gravely, "I wish I was a man."

This piqued Neji because it implied that somehow men did not have problems of any sort of painful or embarrassing nature but he could think of several which were the equivalent to periods or worse, and so he listed some for Temari's benefit, starting with the fact that women never had visible hard-ons after particularly erotic dreams when sharing tents on missions and stuff.

"Yeah okay," Temari said with an eye-roll, "when is the last time you had morning wood, you prude? I bet you dream about border duty."

"_That_ wasn't the point," said Neji, slightly disconcerted, and he adroitly changed the subject by trying to make Temari bite the can of tuna, which Temari did not respond favourably too, as the reader may guess.

Temari eventually threatened to barf on him if he didn't stop, which made Neji sit still again quite quickly because he liked to keep his clothes pristinely white, thank you very much.

Then Neji began to wander around the room and he noticed the loose floorboard and asked what the magazines were that he could see under it, at which point Temari blew him the hell out of her bunkhouse again and locked the door.

Days ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen passed very slowly for a lonely Neji a that-time-of-the-month-ing Temari.

VVVVVV

**A/N:** Click next!


	7. Chapter 7

VVVVVV

On the fourteenth day, a veritable downpour rained down suddenly on the Konoha side of the road while, thanks to a meteorological peculiarity which we have previously noted, the Suna side remained dry as a bone and in fact enjoyed a particularly glorious sunshine.

This made Neji grouchier than usual because he was getting drenched on his log while Temari stretched in catlike contentment on her boulder in the sun on the other side of the road and ignored him.

Neji endured the rain until his hair started to go frizzy, which was utterly inadmissible. He considered going into his bunkhouse and not coming back out until the rain stopped, but a Hyuuga could never let a little rain dampen his spirits or frizzle his hair, so he began to concoct a plan whereby he might hang out at Suna until the downpour ceased.

Eventually Neji settled on going to the Sand side under the pretext of asking Temari whether she happened to have any artichoke hearts because he didn't, which was a kind of a thin excuse for a plan but it was the best he could come up with considering that he was soaked down to his boxers and kind of cold.

Neji accordingly made his cool and collected way across the road and emerged from his curtain of rain to stand in front of Temari looking somewhat bedraggled.

Temari laughed pitilessly at Neji's condition and informed him that his white clothes had gone all transparent, upon which she began to look at him very closely indeed and this made Neji glad that his excellent fashion sense had recommended a dark wrap around his waist.

Temari noticed the dark wrap too but _she_ called it poor fashion sense and told him so, and then she lay on her back on her rock, looked at Neji upside-down and told him to get the hell back to his side before she kicked his ass for trespassing on hers.

"Wait," said Neji, who rather regretted the way he had kept Temari off of Leaf turf when she wanted her magazine a few days ago, "I wanted to ask you something."

"What?" asked Temari impatiently when Neji took his time formulating his request for artichoke hearts to try and make it sound at least sort of cool.

"I was…" said Neji, who kept being distracted by the way Temari was laying on her rock and looking upside-down at him because it made her arch her back which made her chest press upwards in a really nice way, "wondering…"

Temari waited a few moments and completed Neji's sentence for him in the following manner: "if you can stay here while your stupid rain keeps pouring? Nope! Get the hell back to your side."

Then Temari stretched on her boulder and Neji could have sworn she was absorbing sunlight or something like a freak lizard. Temari did not appreciate this comparison when he shared it with her and she retorted that she would rather look like a freak lizard than a wet rat in a loincloth.

"Anyway," said Neji, who did not find this likeness flattering, "do you have any artichoke hearts?"

"What the hell," said Temari, "is an artichoke?"

Temari looked at Neji in an upside-down scandalized sort of way, clearly thinking that artichokes were some sort of small fuzzy mammal and Neji ate their hearts, which totally confirmed his horrible nature.

Neji pressed a palm to his forehead. "How can you not know what an artichoke is?"

"Maybe we eat different things in Suna, like not-small-fuzzy-mammals-things." said Temari. "So what's an artichoke?"

"Um," said Neji when he realized he wasn't even sure what exactly an artichoke was, "it's like a bunch of leaves and on the inside there's –"

"A bunch of leaves!" exclaimed Temari in upside-down delight, "I knew you were a vegetarian leaf-eating Leaf! You totally ate that leaf I gave you, didn't you."

Temari sat up properly because the blood was getting to her head and Neji was relieved because otherwise he kept getting distracted by her bust, which made the conversation unfair. Temari began to look around for another leaf with which she could feed Neji.

Neji politely declined the dusty twig with a shrivelled leaf attached that Temari plucked from somewhere beside her boulder and offered him. Temari was offended at this refusal of her cooking and she tried to smack Neji with her fan in retaliation and didn't stop until he had backed out of range and into his curtain of rain.

"Well now," said Temari before leaning forwards and slipping the twig and leaf behind Neji's ear, "maybe this will make a good umbrella for you."

The leaf promptly fell off under the weight of the water and Neji pulled fiercely at the twig, yanking out several hairs in the process, which left him extremely cranky.

Temari wiped her hand carefully because in reaching towards Neji she had gotten it wet and being wet was something she really hated. Then she sat primly upon her boulder with her great fan spread behind her – it occurred to her that Neji might ask to borrow it to serve as a better umbrella than her leaf, which she would love to see happen – and watched Neji smoulder at her behind his sheet of pouring rain.

Temari smiled like a very satisfied feline. "Don't drown or anything, okay?" she called, and she turned her back to Neji to resume her photosynthesizing.

Neji really loathed Temari at that point for her inhuman lack of compassion about him being cold and wet and frizzy-haired, and so he stepped back into sunny Suna, grabbed her around the waist and threw her unceremoniously into the rain so as to make her suffer too.

Temari landed gracefully on her feet (because she had a cat motif to maintain) and hissed and unsheathed her claws – well, figuratively, and she began to swear at Neji very loudly and very longly and very wetly before stalking back towards her rock to get her fan and kick some ass.

Neji wisely prevented her from doing so by using the secret ninja technique of Flying Tackle No Jutsu, which resulted in both of them rolling in mud and Temari kicking and screaming like she was about to be drowned – she _really_ hated water – and Neji telling himself that if anyone came around the bend right now, he would have to kill them because nobody must ever witness this.

Then Temari grabbed a fistful of Neji's hair, which was a big mistake because then he wasn't just mad, he was _extremely pissed_, which made for two extremely pissed ninja slipping and sliding, tearing at each others' clothes and trying to slay each other.

Soaking wet.

In mud.

Which was pretty sexy if you thought about it, not that either of them was thinking about it.

Eventually Neji gained the upper hand like the guys always do and held Temari down, shouting what might have been "let go of my hair … let _go_!" but maybe not because Neji would totally come up with something wittier than that.

Then they came to a stalemate and had an impromptu-but-furious staring contest which Neji won because Temari was on her back and thus got rain in her eyes and plus Neji had the whole bloodline thing going for him in that respect.

They panted at each other and Temari said slowly so he would understand, "if you get off, I'll let go," but Neji sure as hell didn't believe her for a second and he said, equally slowly, "if you let go, I'll get off," and then Temari began to squirm and shout "get off!" several times in rapid succession to drown out Neji's stupid proposal and then they both realized that there were vague sexual connotations in those words, which was pretty funky.

Then they realized there were not-so-vague sexual connotations in their positions which was even funkier except not since they were _so_ not attracted to each other, what the hell.

And so Temari wiggled furiously and Neji attacked her arm with his teeth (but not _very_ hard, only enough to make her release his hair), and then Temari landed a knee to his stomach. Unfortunately, Neji had abs o' steel so all that did was make him retaliate with a particularly hard bite which made Temari tighten her hold on his hair even more and vow not to let go until he severed her hand from her arm with his teeth if he could.

Neji considered this very seriously and was about to make the transition from vegetarian to cannibal when the rain let up as abruptly as it had begun and suddenly he and Temari were both blinking dazedly in rainbow-bright sunshine that splintered the light into innumerable prismatic fragments and countless droplets of water scintillated in iridescent splendour all about them.

Both stopped their floundering momentarily to enjoy this trippy experience.

"Whoa," said Temari from somewhere under Neji's chest, "everything is so beautiful!"

She almost lost herself into another descriptive dalliance but then she felt like her nose was getting kind of squashed by Neji's collarbone which reminded her of her dire circumstances and so she added, "except for you," and proceeded to try to damage Neji's face irreparably by smearing it with mud with her free hand. This gave Neji the idea and he returned the favour except he tried to put a handful of mud in Temari's mouth, which she would absolutely not submit to.

Then they writhed together some more and found it very exciting and sensuous which meant that they had to stop immediately because they were _so_ not going to go there.

And so Neji rolled partially off of Temari and Temari partially let go of Neji's hair and they continued in this gradual way until they had successfully disengaged without either party having the final advantage (though Temari did give Neji's hair a good final tug because she was a vindictive female with a reputation to maintain after all) and then they huffily stalked to their respective bunkhouses to clean off the mud that covered them from head to toe.

Temari made a detour to her boulder to fetch her fan, which resulted in a delay that caused a considerable loss of dignity as we shall see in a moment, because Kankuro came swinging out of the Konoha forest at that point smelling faintly of manure.

When he spotted Temari, Kankuro asked her if she had been cleaning out a barn too, because she was covered in crap, in case she didn't know.

When Temari ignored him and picked up her fan, Kankuro asked what the hell kind of keener she was to do border duty and clean out a barn at the same time, anyway.

Temari replied loftily that she had actually taken up women's mud-wrestling, thank you.

When Kankuro pressed for details about the other women's mud-wrestling contestants and whether any of them were naked, Temari was unable to provide further information and she admitted that she had lied: this was just part of a new training regimen whereby she dragged herself around with her teeth – it was all the rage in Konoha.

This answer satisfied Kankuro because on his way back from the barn he had swung over a man in a green outfit and orange leggings doing this very thing.

Temari then took a good look at Kankuro and asked him how exactly he had managed to get two black eyes, massive subcutaneous bruising and a shuriken partially embedded in his chest while cleaning out a barn.

Kankuro looked proudly down at the shuriken sticking out of his sternum and said, "I stopped in Konoha on the way back from the barn."

Temari didn't find this very explanatory and told him so, and Kankuro elaborated, thus: he had gone to Konoha to find Tenten because she was the only accessible chick on his Hit List and he had, very suavely he thought, opened the conversation with jokes about Belgian reporters and pet pigs. Tenten had not taken kindly to his overtures, as his injuries attested.

Temari suggested to Kankuro that maybe he shouldn't have gone to see Tenten right after having cleaned out a barn, because one whiff of him and everyone was running for the hills screaming bloody murder. Kankuro made a note to remember this tip next time.

Kankuro then waved to Temari and swung off again with his arms flapping uselessly behind him and a panoramic sweep of the camera followed him at a distance with occasional close-ups of his face while he muttered his new physiotherapy schedule – courtesy of Tenten – to himself.

VVVVVV

**A/N:** I love Kankuro!

Double update because I'm out for three weeks – trip to Central America! I'll send you something, pick one:

a) Cheerful postcard

b) Garish souvenir

c) Sand

d) Strange plant(s)

e) A gastrointestinal complaint heretofore undiscovered by science.

Choose wisely… Haha. Take care!


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N: **Greetings! See my profile update if I'm on your author alert list for my other stories (_Marrow _and _Uneasy Coexistence_). Otherwise, please enjoy this newest installment of _Via Media_. A lot of inter-chapter references here, so hopefully you will remember the details of earlier scenes. If not, well, inexplicable and extemporaneous crack is the best kind of crack.

VVVVVV

On the fifteenth day, Temari took stock of her dwindling supplies and realized that she was running out of cheez-whiz _and_ her organic yogurt had rotted due to the fact that it hadn't been refrigerated because she didn't have cousins called Ano who brought her mini-fridges.

Consequently, Temari decided to steal supplies from Neji since he had a mini-fridge and all sorts of swanky food like beef bourguignon and champagne-flavoured brioche and wild boar with freshwater bass soufflé and brie in clam chowder with raspberry drizzle and goat cheese, which all sounded kind of gross when you thought about it but that's swanky food for you, and since all Temari had was organic yogurt past its due date she wasn't going to be picky.

Temari accordingly popped out of her bunkhouse and made her way towards where Neji sat on his log, and Neji watched her rather apprehensively because when Temari approached him, it was rarely a good thing.

Temari stood importantly before Neji in silence, straight-backed and with her fan open for added effect, and cleared her throat like she was about to expound on the state of the union.

She wanted to look particularly imposing because the day before she had refused to do Neji any sort of favour, so it was probable that he would reject her appeal for aid very flatly, unless she posed _thus_ with her fan held _just so_ with the ensuing unspoken intimation that if he refused whatever she asked, she would immediately decapitate him.

When Temari was quite satisfied with her pose, she told Neji that she was hereby commandeering the basket of food that Ano had brought him since she didn't want to see it go to waste. Her fan hovered dangerously at the level of Neji's neck.

When Neji asked Temari who exactly Ano was – which she clarified impatiently, how could he be so dense, Ano was his cousin, obviously – he asked her what exactly made her think the food was going to waste. Temari pointed out that, duh, Neji only ate leaves.

This made Neji close his eyes wearily and then Temari volunteered by the way to tell Ano during her next visit that the baskets could be delivered directly to herself instead, to save her the hassle of crossing the road to pick them up from Neji in future. Neji told her that that would not be necessary because he actually ate the food, but thank you for the offer all the same.

Temari found this unsatisfactory because she was hungry. And so she pestered the hell out of Neji until he agreed to give her something, at least, because she really didn't want to eat stale bread and cheez-whiz for the next six days and surely he could spare something like a rack of prime ribs or a lasagna.

Neji got up in an irritated way and stepped into his bunkhouse to fetch something for her and remained there for quite a while.

In the meantime, Temari amused herself by carving graffiti into his log in the form of a row of artichokes saying "we hate Neji".

Eventually Temari got tired of waiting and so she marched up to the door of Neji's bunkhouse and tapped it smartly with her fan and asked him if he was lost, in which case he only had to follow the sound of her voice to come back out.

Then Neji poked his head out of his bunkhouse and called her an impatient cow and handed her a plate and on that plate was a single pea.

Temari held the plate and looked at it and was supremely unimpressed because there was no garnish.

"Where's the parsley?" Temari asked, and Neji tried to shut the door on her instead of answering.

This was of course unacceptable to Temari and she pushed past Neji and shoved him into the wall on the way in, which was a gratuitous infliction of pain but then again he had just given her a pea on a plate when she knew for a fact that he had at least one can of tuna somewhere on the premises because he had tried to knock her teeth out with it previously.

Neji did not appreciate being shoved into a wall in his own freakin' bunkhouse and informed Temari of this by shoving her into the wall very hard, which Temari responded to with a cross check which Neji responded to with a diving tackle which prompted an all-out brawl which ended up – somehow or other – with Neji being smothered face-first into his own pillow and Temari sitting quite triumphantly on his back.

Temari paused just as she was about to club Neji with her fan to remark loudly that Neji had 400 thread count black silk sheets and how was that fair?

Then Temari looked around the bunkhouse properly (because her face wasn't being stuffed into various parts of Neji for a second) and noted with great vexation that while the Sand bunkhouse was comfortable as far as bunkhouses go, it turned out that the Leaf bunkhouse had been outfitted by the Hyuugas to transform it into something approaching seven star accommodations complete with a deliciously thick pile rug, a flat-screen television, a chandelier, a fully-equipped kitchenette and the Hyuuga symbol splashed onto every available surface.

Temari wanted to check if the en-suite bathroom had a jacuzzi, and if so whether it was shaped like the Hyuuga crest, but that would mean that she would have to get off Neji and then he would be free to roam and possibly kick her out so that wasn't an option.

In fact, Temari decided aloud, she would just sit here until border duty was over because she could reach the mini-fridge from where she was and Neji's back was quite comfortable and she would of course make sure to feed him too, with the leaves of a nearby houseplant.

Neji told Temari in a voice muffled by his pillow that she could absolutely not sit there for the next six days, and to get off and also get out right now.

Temari asked Neji kindly if he was getting a kinked neck, to which he replied no not really, which prompted her to ask what the hell he had to complain about then because anybody would love to have their face stuffed into a 400 thread black silk pillowcase by a babe such as herself, the ungrateful jerk.

Temari then reached for the mini-fridge which made Neji very upset because he didn't want her to steal his caviar, and thus did Temari find out that Neji was a skilled twister and wriggler to the extent that she couldn't keep her seat and much less steal caviar.

At last Neji managed to flip Temari off and onto her back and then he tried to sit on _her_ but her fan was in the way and there was a confusion of limbs and shoves and somehow they ended up in a mutual headlock and then they stopped and looked at each other real close and the single pea rolled under the bed and lay forgotten.

But that lasted for, like, two seconds max, okay, until they started getting flashbacks to a fight in the rain at some point in their past lives (it was a memory they liked to suppress) and then Temari whirled away and snatched an armful of canned goods and breezed the hell out of there like only a chick from the country of Wind can.

Neji let her run because, as it turned out, in her hurry Temari had forgotten her fan (possibly because he was sitting on it) and he figured it would make an excellent hostage for when he felt like starting negotiations to get his stuff returned.

Thus, Neji folded the fan carefully – nevertheless managing to cut himself on its edges because it seemed to know what was going on and had a character as pernicious as its owner's – and stashed it under a loose ceiling tile. (That loose ceiling tile was the equivalent of the Sand bunkhouse's loose floorboard except Neji hadn't put any questionable magazines up there because he was too proper for that kind of garbage).

Neji then wandered back outside to his log feeling quite sure that, with the fan in his possession, the affair would eventually be sorted to his satisfaction.

Across the road, Temari perched upon her boulder after she had determined that Neji was not going to pursue her and whine about his missing foodstuffs, which was odd but she wasn't complaining, and she cracked open a can of pineapples proceeded to ignore Neji and eat them.

This meant that Neji and Temari weren't interacting, which meant that they were behaving themselves, which resulted in a few tragically boring hours of all work and no play and, of course, when they were actually doing their jobs no-one came along trying to smuggle F-16s and Sasukes, which was kind of provoking.

When Temari sucked up her last juicy pineapple slice she noticed with a horrible jolt that her fan was missing and after she had recovered from her shock she began to pay more attention to Neji's smugger-than-usual look on his log over there and then she _knew_ he had it, the thieving rascal.

Unfortunately for him, Temari told herself as she slipped something out of her pocket, she was a thieving rascal too and she had something to bargain with.

VVVVVV

Neji watched Temari pull the something out of her pocket and begin to shout insults at it. After ascertaining that it wasn't a can of caviar, he turned away as there was nothing abnormal about this behaviour insofar as it was Temari who was acting this way and she was a bit of a yoyo and it was all very SNAFU.

Then Temari threw the thing into the air and Neji kept an eye on it because knowing Temari it was probably coated in fan polish and organic yogurt and heading towards his hair, but the object simply descended again, hit the ground with a thud and got kicked back upwards and then sideways and then trampled into the ground and dragged around under Temari's heel and so on and so forth.

When the thing was smashed viciously into Temari's boulder, Neji thought there was something oddly familiar about the black flap of material hanging off of it. Then he noticed the silver rectangle of metal and realization hit him and he activated his Byakugan very suddenly and that only confirmed what he had just understood.

Neji's hand flew to his forehead and, _horrors_, he only felt his brow and the fact was that his forehead protector was currently across the road enduring assault and battery by an unhinged wacko.

Neji took a moment to compose himself. He then crossed the road with determined strides and the very reasonable aim of fetching his property and killing Temari.

However, Temari saw Neji coming and deduced what his purpose was in crossing over and she found his intentions to be both unacceptable and objectionable and indicated that this was the case by catapulting Neji back onto his side of the road with a firm body smash, which Neji recovered from quite agilely.

And then Temari became aware suddenly that she was actually _in trouble_ because she didn't have her fan and how the hell was she supposed to keep some close-range taijutsu nerd away without her ranged attacks and the quite literal iron defence of her fan?

"Oh my god," thought Temari, "I'm dead."

Neji was also aware that Temari didn't have her usual brain-clubbing groin-scything cyclone-invoking battle aid thanks to his brilliance and this made him extremely pleased because essentially he was now going to be kicking this taijutsu-less Wind chick's ass and he was going to enjoy it.

"I am now going to put you in a coma," Neji declared in an offensively cheerful fashion. "This is called the Gentle Fist technique –"

Temari backed away quickly and suggested that they just have a Gentle Handshake instead, and then she really wanted to make like her scorpion and bury because she could barely spin and dodge out of Neji's reach without her fan to keep him at a distance. But then maybe he'd make like his beetle and that wouldn't do.

After several narrow misses, Neji did that intimidating circling thing with his hands raised and Temari asked him what the hell he was doing, was it a Gentle Dance? She knew the rhumba and this one move called "hightail it the hell out of here," which she proceeded to demonstrate by sprinting past Neji to his bunkhouse to retrieve her fan, and when she got there she skidded to a halt, swung open the door, slipped inside and slammed it on the pursuing Neji's face.

However, before Temari could figure out how to engage the complex locking mechanism (in her defence, it involved a pin tumbler lock, moveable hinge screws and three double-cylinder deadbolts because those Hyuugas are a paranoid lot), Neji had re-opened the door, shoved a foot between it and the frame and was coming in.

Temari backed into the furthest recess possible, which happened to be the stove, and there she held Neji's forehead protector over the burners and threatened to incinerate it if he came one step closer.

Then Neji informed her that this was one of those new-fangled induction heating electric models, so good luck with that, and then he had that _look_ that said "victory is mine," and when a Hyuuga gets that look you know what's about to happen, and yes Temari knew what was about to happen, and so she shot a potent pre-emptive strike in the form of "_anything_ but the melodramatic flashbacks!" in a very loud scream.

This rather knocked the wind out of Neji's sails since he was about to launch into a treatise on predestination and free will and a description of how he was like a caged bird quite as eloquent as Temari's pastoral dalliances.

Temari undertook to initiate diplomatic negotiations immediately to forestall Neji's impending Gentle Fisting and Melodramatic Flashbacking, and she did so by stuffing the forehead protector down her shirt and promising to return it to Neji only once her fan was in her possession again.

Neji paused to consider the benefits of just holding the for once defenceless Temari against the stove, sticking a hand up her shirt and grabbing his forehead protector – and there were many benefits, not the least of which was that he could cop a feel while doing so – but eventually his gentlemanly upbringing won over and he assented, specifying that besides getting the forehead protector returned he wanted a massage as collateral because he had pulled something in his back when hiding her fan and that was her fault.

Temari agreed on these terms without hesitation and they shook hands and clasped arms amicably to seal the deal, if you can call Temari's attempt at breaking Neji's knuckles a handshake, and Neji's subsequent engaging of Temari in a brief but fierce arm wrestling bout an amicable arm clasp.

When they untangled themselves from this cordially-executed accord a few moments later, Temari rubbed her bruised forearm and figured that she would give Neji his back massage using the butt end of her fan and that would teach him.

Temari reached into her shirt to take out the forehead protector and Neji found himself feeling vaguely jealous of the thing. Then Neji lifted the ceiling tile and took out the fan (it gave him a solid pinch before he managed to extract it) and the exchange of hostages went smoothly. Temari snatched her fan from Neji's grasp at the same time as Neji hooked his forehead protector out of her hand and after a momentary tug of war, both parties had their respective items and were satisfied with this re-establishment of the right order of things.

After smothering her fan in kisses and endearing words (Neji found himself feeling vaguely jealous of an inanimate item for the second time in minutes) Temari gave Neji a sly look and leapt towards his closet where she swung open the door declaring loudly that she fully expected it to be filled with buttless chaps.

As it turned out, it was full of neat rows of Armani suits which Temari observed with the critical eye of one who has no idea what the hell is going on with suits. She concluded that they must all make Neji look fat and Neji squeezed between her and the closet door and shut it and asked her to stop touching his stuff, and to stay away from his mini-fridge and no she could not turn that on –

And of course Temari was turning on the flat-screen television and marvelling at Neji's impressive willpower because if she had this in _her_ bunkhouse you'd never see her outside because she'd be watching men's nude mud-wrestling all day.

Neji then switched off the set and said "so how about that massage?" and Temari said, "so lie down," which Neji did on his bed and then Temari clambered on behind him and prepared to give him a very vigorous kneading with the butt end of her fan.

Unfortunately Neji had his Byakugan on and he creeped Temari out severely when he told her to wipe that look off her face because if she thought he was going to let her break his spine she had another thing coming.

Temari was consequently forced to put both her brutal plans and her fan aside and she prodded gingerly at Neji's back with her fingertips until he laughed into his pillow and asked her what the hell kind of massage that was supposed to be.

This aggravated Temari considerably because she didn't want to, like, make the massage _sensuous_ or anything and so she retaliated by pummelling Neji's shoulder blades with her fists, which shut him up pretty fast but he didn't complain about the intensity because that would be unmanly.

When Temari tired of that she began to pinch Neji's back in a manner very reminiscent of the way her fan had just pinched his finger and Neji could see where the fan got it from.

Then Temari dusted her hands to make it known that the massage was over and Neji noted to her that that was the worst massage he had ever had in his life. Temari told him it served him right for hiding her fan in such a ridiculous place and, by the way, she hoped that he slipped a disc next time he tried any such mischief.

Then Temari reached sneakily to a side table whereon there sat a tin of tea biscuits and when Neji objected to her continued swiping of his stuff, Temari generously held the tin towards him and offered him one of his own biscuits, and Neji took one gratefully because at least it wasn't a leaf.

They crunched on these in companionable silence and Temari reached reflexively forward at one point to brush crumbs off of Neji's mouth, which made them both pause for a while and Temari wondered what the hell she was thinking and was embarrassed and she began to crumble biscuits into Neji's sheets to distract him.

This worked very well in the sense that Neji then pushed her off the bed and began to crumble biscuits in her hair and then they had another fight which broke into a chase when Temari snatched her fan and the entire tin of biscuits and ran out the door.

When the chase petered out (Temari having been subjected to the infamous Flying Tackle No Jutsu and squashed bodily to Neji's log), a truce was declared and the biscuits were equitably divided by Temari and she handed half of them to Neji, who found this kind of funny because they were all his anyway, and then they sat side-by-side and crunched some more.

Then Temari whipped out a kunai and modified the graffiti she had previously chiselled into the log by crossing out the word 'hate' and carving 'love' in its place, so the row of artichokes said "we love Neji" instead, and Neji took the kunai – and they touched hands but it was an accident – and gave them all smiley faces.

And so silence fell once more on the sunny place between the two bunkhouses of Sand and Leaf, broken only occasionally by the sound of biscuit-munching.

VVVVVV


	9. Chapter 9

VVVVVV

On the sixteenth day, Temari and Neji were out at dawn – one to soliloquize, one to do his job like the serious stoic jounin he was.

Their respective activities were interrupted by the arrival of Kiba and Akamaru, Kiba bearing another large basket emblazoned with the Hyuuga crest and Akamaru bearing the reek of wet dog. Temari wrinkled her nose, watched them walk towards Neji from her boulder and eavesdropped very impolitely on their conversation.

Temari thus found that this Kiba fellow was delivering this basket as a favour to a team mate called Hinata because she couldn't come: she had spontaneously developed a weird new phobia of scorpions for some reason and refused to leave the house. At this point Temari deduced very astutely that 'Hinata' must be a codename for the girl called Ano.

Neji thanked Kiba in his haughty Hyuuga way and both young men had a manful stare-down to decide who was the alpha between them and whether Kiba should mutter "welcome" indistinctly or whether he should just turn around and leave in a hunky virile indomitable fashion.

Meanwhile, Temari prowled territorially around her boulder and watched Akamaru wander towards her with her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

The metallic snap of Temari's fan as it opened made Neji and Kiba break out of their stalwart staring stupor and turn to look towards her. When Temari held the open fan above her and walked slinkily to the edge of her boulder to glare at Akamaru in a very dramatic and sexy manner, Kiba whistled low and said, "I'd hit that," at which point Neji really wanted to hit _him_.

But Neji had to agree that Temari was cutting a particularly fine figure standing aggressively on her rock with her fan raised, backlit by the dawn so that her hair shone halo-like around her fierce features like she was some high priestess of the sun – until she cried "this is pride rock, baby! And that Nala was a bitch!" to Akamaru, which somewhat ruined the effect.

Temari then proceeded to inform Akamaru that animal pelts were banned goods and so he could not enter Suna unless he shaved himself, sorry, no exceptions, and where were his immigration documents please. Akamaru made no reply and so Temari labelled him an illegal alien, whirled her fan and blew him off of her turf to Kiba's feet.

Kiba was slightly offended at this but he didn't complain because that might wreck his chances with the hot chick, and Akamaru was more than slightly offended by this but he didn't complain because he couldn't make any coherent sound except for "antidisestablishmentarianism," which really isn't very coherent at all.

When Kiba started to make his studly way towards Temari to insult her for bowling over Akamaru like that and then hit on her in his animalistic raunchy way, Neji took matters into his own hands quite literally by grasping Kiba by the coat more violently than was necessary and reminding him very forcefully that he was in a rush to get somewhere, _wasn't that right?_

And Kiba took the hint because when Neji's face went veiny _without_ the Byakugan activated it meant he was pretty damn pissed, and so Kiba said "that's so right" in a deep bestial growl that made the knees of all of the women in a ten mile radius buckle.

"Wow," said Temari when Kiba had left and she had picked herself up from where she had fallen when her knees had buckled, "what a beefcake."

"So you like them brawny and dumb," said Neji with an eyeroll – not that you could tell he was rolling his eyes since they were so weird, and Temari had to ask him "are you rolling your eyes?" just to confirm that he was – and Temari answered that yes she liked them brawny, because that meant they had a lot of endurance for, you know, getting frisky.

Neji pointed out rather curtly that there was _so_ no scientific correlation between brawn and endurance for getting frisky, and Temari asked him what proof he had of what he was advancing, please, and Neji offered to prove it to her right there if she wanted and then they both looked around and pretended he hadn't just said that and Neji really wanted to kill himself.

"So I take it you like them scrawny and smart," said Temari after a while, and she was pleased because she thought she fell into this category except she was not quite scrawny but svelte, no – slim – no – totally bodacious.

"I like them totally bodacious and smart," said Neji, and when he caught Temari's self-satisfied look he quickly informed her that unfortunately she was neither.

Temari was affronted and she grasped Neji by the kimono and said, "say that to my face!" and in saying so she pushed Neji onto his log and pressed herself against him in the most distracting way.

And Neji realized, not for the first time, that she had a really nice bust when it pressed into his chest and nice legs when they wrapped behind his knees and nice butt when he slid his hand behind her and he really liked the way she was straddling him like that and the way she was still pretending to be waiting for him to say it again, yeah okay make me say it again, and then they were kind of bumping noses and then they were kind of bumping mouths and oh holy crap.

Then they sprang apart like that _so did not just happen_ and Neji frowned and looked into the distance very stoically and Temari opened and closed her fan to check that it was okay.

Then they looked sideways at one another and caught each others' eyes and scoffed and spent the remainder of the day on their respective seats facing away from each other most determinedly.

VVVVVV


	10. Chapter 10

VVVVVV

On the morning of the seventeenth day, Temari lounged on her boulder under a cloudless sky and amused herself by watching Neji train across the road and making occasional remarks of the genre "you call that a punch? I call that heavy petting. Stop harassing that tree."

When Neji started to get good and sweaty beating the crap out of the surprisingly resistant young tree, Temari called to him that she had a request to make.

"What?" puffed Neji.

"Take off your shirt," said Temari.

Neji rubbed his temples in a long-suffering way before saying "no" in a very final manner.

"Why not?" asked Temari in a way that suggested that these were only the preliminaries so such decisive finality was out of place.

"Because," said Neji, "I'll get a sunburn or something."

"Aw," said Temari. "You're just too shy to show off your buff bod."

"I don't have a buff bod," said Neji, and then he added somewhat acerbically, "ask Kiba instead."

"Who the hell is Kiba?"

"The beefcake."

"Oh yeah…" said Temari. "I'll be the judge of that. Take it off."

Neji turned to Temari with a look that threatened a gory death if she continued and so of course Temari continued.

"Take it off."

"I'm not going to."

"Take it off."

"No."

"Take it off –"

"Okay."

"Really?"

"If you take yours off too."

Temari paused to evaluate how much she actually wanted to see a sweaty Neji shirtless and decided that it wasn't worth risking her going topless at this point, lest some do-gooder Sand administrator wandered by to check on her and reported her for lewd behaviour. Which isn't to say that she wasn't tempted.

Temari was silent for a few minutes on her boulder and Neji waited impatiently for her to start stripping, but she finally declined and Neji was disappointed because this was uncharacteristically mature of her and that wasn't entertaining at all. And also at the thought of toplessness he had instantly planned on challenging Temari to a wrestling match so that they could engage in some shirtless luscious fun while pretending to be training. And maybe it would eventually devolve into pantless fun and skirtless fun and fishnetless fun.

But alas! She had refused. Neji found this totally selfish and he returned to abusing the tree rather crossly.

Temari sat and watched and finally asked if Neji didn't have a book she could borrow or something because, as riveting as it was to watch him assault an innocent tree and give it permanent psychological scars, she needed some real intellectual stimulation.

Neji grumpily mumbled something about having a couple of books on a shelf by his bed, and Temari took that as an invitation to check them out and she waltzed past Neji into his bunkhouse.

When Temari entered Neji's bunkhouse, she completely forgot about the books because the shiny flat-screen beckoned her to watch television for the next six hours while Neji trained like a nerd.

This plan was thwarted, however, because Neji had hidden the remote and all Temari could get on the television was an infomercial on repeat which seriously advised her that if her manhood was deficient in size she could use this amazing product to enlarge it to lengths of twelve feet. After watching this infomercial loop for several minutes, Temari decided that the characters on this show were well-endowed but insipid and the plot was way too repetitive and so she turned her attention back to the books.

There were precisely three books on the shelf by the bed and they seemed to have been placed there to make the owner look cultured rather than to provide actual reading material: there sat _A Study in Ineptitude: Leaf Council Members Past and Present_, and leaning against it was an abridged version of _War and Peace_, and _250 Exciting Aquatic Vertebrates of the Waterways of Konoha _completed the trio.

Temari would rather endure an un-anaesthetized root canal than even lift the cover of any of those and so she knocked them about vindictively because just looking at them was sapping her will to live.

After _War and Peace_ had fallen over, Temari's eye was caught by a slim volume that she hadn't noticed before and she picked it up hopefully. It was entitled _A Brief History of Ninja Weaponry_ and, while that didn't sound like the most absorbing of books, it was sure as hell better than Tolstoy and Temari wandered back to her boulder quite satisfied.

Temari presently draped herself upon her rock, tuned out the sounds of Neji's tree-assaulting, and flipped to the chapter on war fans, which turned out to be quite an interesting read. Among other things, Temari learned that early practitioners of the art of tessenjutsu fought naked in mud, and she wondered vaguely whether she was somehow destined to revive that tradition because nudity and mud-wrestling were such frequently recurring themes in her life as of late.

Temari finished the chapter on war fans and, since she was not particularly interested in the development the industrial production of the poisoned senbon, she began to flick through the rest of the book half-heartedly.

When she reached the final chapter, she noticed a small piece of paper that had been slipped between the pages and, judging by its yellowed edges, forgotten about a long time ago.

Temari raised an eyebrow, plucked it out and turned it over.

And then she started to scream.

Across the road, Neji whirled and scanned the area for the hordes of monstrous enemies that must have been making their way towards Temari for her to be shrieking "oh my god" like that. He saw none, of course, and so he directed his attention to Temari herself and asked her what the hell was the matter, had she sat on a kunai or something?

Temari was silent for a moment because she was sucking in air after having sustained the word "god" for so long, and then she feebly waved the bit of paper at Neji and seemed to be in some sort of swoon.

Mildly concerned, Neji made his way towards her and wondered if he should, like, do some pre-emptive CPR on her just in case.

When he reached Temari, Neji tried to snatch the paper out of her hands but she absolutely would not let him have it and she only held it for him to look at instead.

As it turned out, it was a photograph.

Of himself.

At age two.

Naked.

And so Neji contemplated suicide for the second time in 48 hours.

Thankfully it wasn't a full frontal shot: the baby Neji was squirming about on his stomach like babies do and looking up at the camera with an expression of vacant optimism – nevertheless, when Temari babbled disjointedly about how cute his bare bum was, Neji wanted to try that hara-kiri ritual self-disembowelment thing right there and then.

Meanwhile, Temari was collapsing of paroxysms of terminal cuteness and struggling to recover the ability to breathe.

"You were _so_ cute," Temari finally exhaled. "And _now_ look at you. What happened?"

"Puberty happened," said Neji, "give it here," and he made to grab the picture again because, as he told Temari, it needed to be destroyed and then he would have to kill her and himself too so as to obliterate this from all living memory.

Temari held the picture out of Neji's reach and poked her fan into his chest to keep him away. She eloquently expressed her rejection of Neji's plans for the picture with an emphatic "hell no," and then she looked at it again and shrieked something incomprehensible about baby cheeks and cherubs and button noses and cupcakes and rainbow sprinkles.

Then Neji utilized another of his impressive arsenal of secret ninja techniques, the Full Body Slam No Jutsu with its variation, And Hold Her There Technique which at least assured him that Temari wouldn't be going anywhere with this horrible picture any time soon. And plus they could wiggle together, and that was always fun.

"Where," Neji breathed angrily in Temari's face, "did you say you found this?"

"I don't remember saying," said Temari querulously because her beloved boulder was now pressing into her back and her unbeloved border duty partner was now pressing into her front and trying to steal her new most prized possession.

Neji then glanced at the copy of _A Brief History of Ninja Weaponry_ that lay a little ways off and narrowed his eyes because it looked familiar and then he realized that it was his book and that his bunker was the only place Temari could have found the picture and, therefore, because he had given Temari permission to borrow a book, this terrible situation was his own doing, and then he wanted to engage in hara-kiri _and_ kamikaze-ing at the same time inasmuch as that was at all possible.

Then they grappled with each other some more, Neji striving determinately to get at the picture and Temari holding it just as determinedly out of his grasp and much struggling and straining and grunting ensued until they toppled over and the combat became more vicious because Temari was sure as hell not letting herself get pinned down this time and Neji was sure as hell not letting her get away to where she might ruin his life forever by showing anybody that picture.

Finally Neji shoved Temari back up against her rock, grabbed her by both shoulders and said very seriously, "stop please," and Temari stopped her struggling because he looked so very serious, and Neji said:

"I will do anything to have that picture."

And Temari smiled slowly and widely and said, "anything?"

"Well," said Neji after a moment of hesitation, "_almost_ anything."

And Temari was looking mischievously at Neji and Neji was starting to feel extremely nervous about this horrible situation.

"Almost anything…" said Temari, and she looked at the picture coyly and then held it behind her back quickly when Neji made another grab for it. "I'll think about it."

"Um," said Neji with an extra squish against Temari to make his point, "you aren't going anywhere until you give me that picture."

"Fine," said Temari. "I'll think about it right here."

And so Temari thought about the possibilities of almost anything plus Neji and considered the pros and cons of various situations and began to giggle to herself, all while Neji waited somewhat apprehensively, and, incidentally, totally pressed against Temari and that was cool, not that either of them was noticing it or anything.

"_Almost_ anything…" mused Temari, and then her eyes lit with a devilish glint and Neji thought, "oh no," because whatever it was, it was going to be bad.

Thus it was that, when Tenten came a'swingin' out of the Konoha forest an hour later, she found Temari lounging on Neji's log, feasting decadently on Neji's Knipschildt chocolate truffles and watching Neji train wearing only his boxers.

Temari spared Tenten a glance and offered her a truffle in an offhand sort of way before turning back to watching Neji, who was by this time very aware that one of his team-mates was there, and he wondered how the hell he was even going to begin to explain this situation. And he really wanted to kill Temari, not for the first time, or the last.

"Wow," said Tenten to Temari with a jerk of her head in Neji's direction, "how'd you manage that?"

"Feminine wiles," said Temari casually, and then she did a double-take because she recognized Tenten and it occurred to her that maybe she was out for revenge against her for that chuunin exam fiasco.

Tenten's intentions seemed to be peaceable enough, however, because she ate a truffle, said "right on," and then turned to Suna and began to walk that way.

"Hey," said Temari, who vaguely remembered something about guarding the border, "where're you going?"

"To Sand," said Tenten, "I need to find someone."

"Who?" asked Temari, promptly forgetting whatever it was about guarding the border, "I might know them."

"This one puppeteer freak who makes really bad jokes and smells like manure."

"Oh," said Temari, "you must mean my brother."

"Does he wear makeup?"

"Yeah," said Temari. "He likes your buns, by the way."

Tenten narrowed her eyes and said, "which buns now?" and then both kunoichi laughed in a very un-ninjalike manner.

"Why are you looking for him, anyway?"

"I want my shuriken back," said Tenten. "He ran away before I could kill him and the one stuck in his chest has my initials engraved in gold filigree. It was expensive."

"Fair enough," said Temari, and to be helpful she gave Tenten Kankuro's address but asked her to please leave him alive since he was good at cleaning out barns.

"Okay," said Tenten, and she popped another truffle into her mouth, nodded to Temari and headed off to Suna to beat the crap out of Kankuro.

Meanwhile, Neji had never felt so ignored in his life.

Since Tenten hadn't even bothered to ask him why he was training in his boxers and Temari was now engrossed in the little pamphlet that came with the truffles ("praline! I love that stuff!") Neji got dressed again, took a handful of bits of paper out of his pocket (which had previously been the photograph) and proceeded to re-shred the pieces until they were so small and smushed that they started to biodegrade.

Temari raised her eyes from her pamphlet and watched Neji work and she smiled a slow Cheshire smile. She had neglected to mention to Neji that there had been a short strip of photonegatives wedged between the pages of the book too, and they included not only that photograph but four others, including a full frontal shot.

And that strip of negatives was now stuffed very secretly, safely and snugly in Temari's bra, and there it was going to remain until she could get the pictures developed, enlarged, framed and sent to Neji by express courier. Then it occurred to Temari that she could rent an advertising billboard instead, with the added benefit that Neji _and _the entire population of Leaf would see these pictures.

Neji saw Temari smile and said, "what?" and Temari replied, "nothing."

And then she noticed that he had gotten dressed and said, "hey. Take your shirt back off," and Neji complied grumpily and Temari's smile widened some more and she almost started to purr.


	11. Chapter 11

VVVVVV

On the eighteenth day, Temari wandered uninvited into Neji's bunkhouse while he was having breakfast and, after they had cordially exchanged death threats, she scored a couple of French crepes from him, dripping with melted butter and utterly delicious.

Temari licked her fingers after having swallowed several crepes in rapid succession and complimented Neji very highly on his cuisine.

She offered to hire him as a chef on the spot, provided that he cooked in his boxers, and Neji accepted, but only provided that Temari eat in her underwear. Temari ultimately had to decline because she was wearing panties that had little cowboys on them and that was too embarrassing to show in public. Neji said he understood, because his boxers today had little rocket ships on them, and so this was probably all for the best.

Then both of them noticed that there was only one crepe left on the plate and they vied for it fiercely: Temari elbowed Neji out of the way and Neji hooked both of her wrists with a hand and held her off and they struggled and Temari asked him if he was really ready to rumble at this hour in the morning, and Neji said duh, he was always ready to rumble.

Finally Neji was able to bring his other arm around Temari and snatch the crepe off of the plate and stuff it partially in his mouth, which infuriated Temari because she was unable to knock out his lights since her wrists were held in an Iron Manly Grip (TM). But there was no way that Temari was just going to sit there and watch the crepe go and so, just as Neji was working it into his mouth, she leaned forward and snatched it with her teeth and began to pull.

The crepe was not made to endure such tension and it began to fall apart with a soggy tear and Temari was catching every bit and grinning triumphantly at Neji's indignant expression. Then Neji retaliated with a similar technique to steal it back and they were just having an exchange of breathy buttery insults around a shared mouthful of crepe when the bunkhouse door burst open and two figures in green flew in.

"Hoh!" said the largest.

"Springtime of Youth!" said the second.

Neji and Temari looked up from where they were essentially making out around a piece of crepe and, after a brief embarrassed silence, they vaulted to opposite sides of the room and tried to look nonchalant.

Temari recovered first. She swallowed, wiped her mouth with a detached air and impeccable poise.

"Hello, Crotch Lee," she said to the smaller figure, "how is your new training regimen working for you?"

This was a skilful move of conversational rhetoric on Temari's part because it effectively made Gai and Lee forget what they had just witnessed in their delight that somebody over than themselves would enquire about Lee's training.

Lee was so overwhelmed that tears shone in his eyes as he described how he had dragged himself back to Konoha along the road using only his teeth and how it had all gone very well until he had bitten into a scorpion and, later, this Rosie O'Donnell lady who also lived in cracks and did poisonous things. Temari nodded understandingly.

"We are here," Gai said importantly after this moving tale had been shared, "to support you, young Neji, in your completion of border duty for the good of your country and your village."

"Only three days left!" piped in Lee encouragingly.

"Your Springtime has blossomed in these three weeks, we can see it in your exhilarated countenance –"

"Your inspired air –"

"Your revitalized look –"

"Your galvanized expression –"

"Your ameliorated mien –"

"Your refreshed visage –"

"Your invigorated aspect –"

And then Gai and Lee ran out of synonyms and Neji and Temari were very grateful.

Gai suddenly looked at his watch and exclaimed that he was late to a meeting with Tsunade about a mission to Mist and both he and Lee shot out of the bunkhouse as suddenly as they had come with loud cries of "youth!" and "vigour!"

"That was Gai," said Neji after the door had slammed loudly behind them. "My sensei. Also the bane of my existence."

"Oh," said Temari. "He seems pretty intense…"

Neji looked at Temari and told her that Gai was second only to her terms of the frequency with which he induced suicidal thoughts. Temari took this as a compliment.

Temari then wandered over to Neji's bookshelf to check if any of his other books had interesting secrets like the one yesterday had, and Neji kept a very vigilant eye on her in case any of them actually did.

When Temari flipped open _250 Exciting Aquatic Vertebrates of the Waterways of Konoha_ and gasped loudly at something on the page, Neji lunged at her to seize it while berating himself for not having burned all of the books the night before.

Then Temari fled outdoors and Neji was hot on her tail praying "not a naked photo again oh god please not again."

Temari halted abruptly at Neji's log, spun around and sat herself upon it with great composure, holding the thick book open on her knee and watching Neji over the top of it.

"It would seem," she informed Neji gravely when he caught up, "that you are a mooneye carp."

Then Neji knew for sure that Temari was crazy. He edged closer and sat down beside Temari slowly so as not to trigger another mad dash, leaned to look at the book and prepared to straight-jacket Temari with her own clothes.

As it turned out, it was not another photograph of Neji that Temari was looking at, but rather a picture of a carp on a page of the book.

"Examine this list of attributes to determine whether or not what you caught is a mooneye carp," read Temari.

"Mooneye are so called because of the metallic silver shine of their eyes." Temari observed Neji and nodded grimly to herself.

"They are mud-dwelling, check," Temari said with a glance at the soggy Leaf ground at her feet.

"They eat moist aquatic vegetation, check," Temari said with a vague gesture to the surrounding foliage and a parenthetical explanation of "leaves, obviously" for the benefit of Neji.

"They are ill-tempered even when unprovoked, definite check."

"And," Temari gave Neji a shrewd look, "they are easy to catch with nets."

"Nets?" said Neji.

"Yeah, nets," said Temari, "like these," and she flipped open the slit of her skirt and flashed a fishnetted leg at Neji.

At this point, Neji tried hard to look exasperated but really he was struggling to keep his eyes in his head and his Byakugan off and hoping that Temari would do that again and maybe he really was a carp after all because wow.

Temari eyed Neji suspiciously because she couldn't espy his caudal fin, but before she could pull off his pants to check for it, Neji snatched the book and flipped the pages, seeking revenge because carps weren't very noble creatures and seeking distraction because _fishnets_.

"Hm," said Neji when he had reached a promising page. "I found what _I_ caught."

"And would that be?" asked Temari, who was, of course, fully expecting a damselfish or something similarly dainty.

"A freshwater urchin," said Neji, pointing at a picture of a prickly creature whose silhouette looked remarkably like Temari's spiky head. "You see the resemblance."

Temari bristled and that made her look very urchin-like indeed.

"They live on rocks, check," said Neji with a look at Temari's boulder across the road.

"Urchin populations destroy their environments with their feeding habits, check."

"They are related to sea cucumbers, check," said Neji.

Temari asked for clarification on that point and Neji answered, "Kankuro, obviously."

"They never brush their hair, check," said Neji, and Temari informed him that she seriously doubted that was in the book since urchins didn't have hair. Neji grabbed a handful of Temari's hair and said, "quills – same thing."

A short tussle followed during which a miffed Temari attempted to take off Neji's pants to find his caudal fin and give it a good pinch and a laughing Neji held her off desperately by her urchin quills and threatened to eat her if she didn't stop because apparently urchins were considered a delicacy in some cultures, especially carp cultures, especially when the urchin was wearing fishnets.

"What a ripoff!" Temari exclaimed when Neji had her in a reverse half nelson and she had him in a chokehold, "this book was supposed to be about _vertebrates_ anyway. Urchins aren't vertebrates, they're like exothermic-radiation-skeletal-tebrates."

Temari declared that she was going to write a letter to the editor of _250_ _Exciting Aquatic Vertebrates of the Waterways of Konoha_ about this massive oversight on his part and that letter would be very succinct, being comprised of six words: "screw you and your urchins, too." Neji thought she should add a post scriptum about mooneye carps and perhaps sue for libel.

When Neji and Temari had settled on this course of action, with Neji agreeing to cover all legal costs and Temari agreeing to use her political leverage to have the editor imprisoned and slain, they untangled themselves, Temari clapped the book shut and they sat in satisfied silence because justice was going to be served.

The silence lengthened and Neji began to look around for something else to talk about and Temari looked at her nails.

And then Neji leaned casually back on his hands so that his arm was kind of behind Temari.

And Temari leaned sideways just as casually so that she was kind of reclining into Neji.

And they sat there and pretended to be enjoying the quiet. But, really, they were just enjoying each other.


	12. Chapter 12

VVVVVV

On the afternoon of the nineteenth day, Temari was fortunate enough to look like she was sort of doing her job when she was treated to an unexpected visit from her darling brother Gaara.

She was reclining upside-down on her boulder at the time, true, but at least she was staring (though rather dreamily) at the Konoha horizon like it was going out of style. We note in passing that the horizon was largely occupied by Neji doing one-handed push-ups across the road with very manful concentration and also that he was shirtless, but this had nothing to do with anything, Temari just happened to be looking that way.

Gaara arrived in a twist of sand and stoic aloofness (and he did not care that stoic aloofness was somewhat redundant).

"Hi," said Temari brightly and upside-down-edly when her littlest brother stood impassively before her with his arms crossed. "Is something wrong?"

"I'm passing through. Just to let you know." said Gaara. "I'm off to Mist for a week – business."

Temari narrowed her eyes because she knew exactly what kind of business brought people to Mist during these days of peace and it had nothing to do with promoting Suna as a tourist destination or marketing Sand industries. Money _would_ be changing hands, but it would be going between the well-manicured fingers of some exclusive club's welcoming hostess and later down rhinestone-encrusted bras – not quite the Suna Financial Ltd. trust fund.

"Check out that one new club for me," Temari requested vaguely, "the one with the blue-skinned male dancers in the buttless chaps. _Chez Kisame_ or something, it's called. Pants optional. I'm so heading there on my next leave. I mean, mission."

Gaara ignored this unprofessional request and instead followed Temari's line of sight because it was very unlike Temari to speak to him in such an airy, slack-jawed manner, and therefore she wasn't paying attention and therefore she was being distracted and there we go, he had spotted the distraction, it was in the form of Neji doing pushups across the road completely unaware of Gaara's presence.

Gaara narrowed his black-rimmed eyes and caused a brisk sandy breeze to pick up suddenly and swoosh about in a very dramatic manner.

This caught Neji's attention very quickly, principally because he got sand up his nose and had to sneeze vigorously several times to clear it, and he vowed between sneezes to slay Temari because she couldn't keep her damn fan under control and kept blowing crap at him.

Then Neji emerged from his sneezing fit and saw that Temari wasn't the cause of it: there was someone near her boulder and that someone was none other than the Kazekage. Who was very stoic and immovable and kind of off his rocker, from what Neji remembered of him. He was also Temari's little brother, which was to Neji an unquestionable confirmation that screwballness ran in families with varying degrees of intensity.

Neji pulled his shirt back on – he had removed it because it was really hot and for no other reason, okay, and it certainly had nothing to do with the fact that he knew Temari had been looking – and he crossed the road to face off with Gaara because Gaara was a threat to his status as most hardass around these parts.

The sandy breeze picked up again as Neji approached and he and Gaara stared at each other and their hair waved around their emotionless faces as they vied to determine who was most hardass between them.

Then music swelled and Neji and Gaara recalled the difficult days of their youth and their absent father figures and the irreconcilable dichotomy between truth and war and Gaara wondered what love was and Neji reflected on divine providence and Gaara meditated on why there was suffering in this world and what it could all mean and Neji speculated on moral relativism and it was all extremely moving and impressive until Temari yelled "staring contest! Nobody blink!" very loudly, which totally ruined the cinematographic moment.

Gaara and Neji broke their locked gazes to give Temari dirty looks for interrupting their emotional Recalling, Reliving and Recuperation (the three Rs they learned at Stiff Prats Anonymous), but Temari remained happily oblivious to them and maundered on about what a grand staring contest this was going to be what with the taciturn insomniac and the pupil-less wonder being participants. "Totally epic!" Temari exclaimed.

As punishment for ruining his poignant moment Gaara decided to make Temari uncomfortable and embarrassed and so he asked her what exactly she saw in Neji, anyway.

Temari was extremely taken aback by this question and its implications and she strenuously denied seeing anything in Neji whatsoever, what the hell kind of question was that? Totally out of left field!

Gaara asked her why she had been gazing dreamily at Neji, then, and Temari informed Gaara that she had been looking at the forest and not Neji, who was devastatingly uninteresting at the best of times.

This only made Gaara more convinced that Temari did see something in Neji especially when Temari became so flustered that she almost knocked herself out with her fan.

Then Gaara turned to Neji and asked him what exactly he saw in Temari and Neji only looked mildly unsettled because he was better at keeping his emotions under control than Temari. He too said he saw nothing in Temari whatsoever, no offence to Gaara, what with Temari being his sister and all, but she was so not his type, not totally bodacious enough, and they had already been through this, by the way.

And Gaara became more certain that Neji did see something in Temari because he knew hardasses and all of their ways and he could detect Neji's extreme perturbation in the way he spoke in very clipped tones and also in the way he had inhaled his own saliva and choked on it before answering.

After letting Temari and Neji stew in their own botheration for a while, Gaara recalled that he had things to see and people to do – or was it the other way around? – in any case, he had to be off, and he gave Neji a curt nod which meant that he accepted Neji into the Callous Clique and in return Neji gave Gaara a manly knuckle-bump which meant that Gaara was accepted into the Passionless Posse. Temari was totally rejected from both of these elite organizations because sometimes she evinced signs of actual emotion, and so she only got a vague wave from Gaara before he vanished in a poof of sand and she got nothing from Neji since he wasn't going anywhere anyway.

When her littlest brother had disappeared, Temari muttered something about him being totally way out there oh my god yeah that was embarrassing.

Neji agreed and stated that it was obvious that Gaara was completely unversed in human interactions like whoa. It wasn't like he and Temari were even friends or anything.

Much less interested in each other.

Or whatever.

Temari nodded and pointed to further proof: she and Neji couldn't even go a day without having a huge fight. Neji said that made for irrefutable evidence for sure, since they always ended up more or less trying to kill one another.

Temari concluded that thus, obviously, indisputably and self-evidently, they totally hated each other.

"Yeah," said Neji.

And then there was a silence and Neji felt the need to clarify:

"Well not hate, exactly. I mean, I can _tolerate_ you. Mostly."

"Yeah, I guess," said Temari, who brightened considerably at this addendum of Neji's, "I can stand you sometimes."

Then they stood around and were quite satisfied with themselves for having quashed Gaara's completely absurd suggestions.

Two figures detached themselves from the Suna skyline at this point and Temari narrowed her eyes and hoped they weren't Gai and Lee or something and Neji Byakuganed them because he also hoped they weren't Gai and Lee and he wanted confirmation one way or another. As it turned out, it was Tenten and Kankuro making their slow way towards the border post.

Tenten and Kankuro seemed to have reconciled their former differences quite well – indeed, perhaps _too_ well for Temari and Neji, who each witnessed one of their team-mates engaging in questionable canoodling with a ninja from another village.

"Um," said Temari when Tenten and Kankuro were close enough to catch the outraged stupefaction which she packed into that one syllable.

"_Um_," reiterated an appalled Neji.

"Um… hi," said Kankuro when his face was unstuck from Tenten's for a moment.

"I got my shuriken back," said Tenten.

"And I took a shower," said Kankuro.

"Now we're going to Mist," Tenten said merrily. "We have a mission."

"A joint mission." Kankuro specified. "Sand and Leaf."

"Yes," said Tenten, "to strengthen diplomatic ties."

"Okay…" said Temari slowly, and then she put one hand on her hip and tapped her foot impatiently and conveyed a general expectancy of awaiting further explanation and that it had better be really good.

However, Kankuro and Tenten deliberately avoided explaining anything else by suctioning their faces back together and tripping away into the Konoha forest without so much as a backward glance at the shocked jounin pair behind them.

"Nauseating," said Neji.

"Yeah," said Temari, and then she added an earnest "_ew_" for emphasis.

When Tenten and Kankuro had left and all sounds of smooching had faded away, Temari sat down glumly on her boulder with her head in her hands.

Neji asked her what was the matter, not that he cared or anything. After a moment, Temari sighed and told him it was obvious that there was a real party shaping up at Mist and she totally hadn't been invited while Kankuro and Tenten had.

Neji then parked himself dispiritedly beside her because he had just remembered that Gai and Lee had also been heading to Mist which meant that they had gotten invites while he hadn't and that was really a humbling proposition.

Then both Temari and Neji felt like social outcasts, which was a very strange feeling for both of them since they were usually the height of cool.

Temari conjectured that perhaps it was an oversight on behalf of whoever was organizing the party, and Neji didn't find that plausible because there was no way anyone could ever forget a Hyuuga, they were invited to all the A-list parties without fail, and Temari said that as daughter to the former Kazekage and the sister of the current one, the situation was the same with her.

Temari could only conclude that everyone had forgotten them because they'd been living in the middle of nowhere for three weeks. Neji found also that this was the only conceivable explanation and therefore everybody they knew had dreadful short-term memory retention rates.

Temari declared that since nobody wanted her she would become a vagabond ninja and she suggested to Neji that he could be her hobo leper companion if he really wanted. Neji declined because he planned on becoming a pariah and exiling himself to a tropical island to write a tell-all book on the Hyuugas, which was a more stylish occupation than that of leprous hobo in his opinion, and Temari had to agree.

Then Temari felt like she was falling off of her boulder and so she shuffled sideways a little bit closer to Neji, and Neji braced himself in case she took it in her head to shove him off, but she didn't, and they sat quietly in the mellow light of late afternoon and contemplated how much their social lives sucked.

And how they were sitting very close and pretty much touching, but it was completely decent and decorous and who read into stuff like that. So anyway their social lives sucked.

"Well," said Temari eventually, "at least we have _that_."

Neji, who had been observing Temari's hand on the boulder and trying to decide whether to place his own two inches beside it or only one, looked up, and he saw a particularly flamboyant sunset in the western sky behind the Konoha tree line.

"Yeah," said Neji. "You don't get that in Mist."

"Exactly," said Temari, "because it's all, you know, misty there."

"Right," said Neji.

Together they watched the sun proceed in its setting and pretended to be slightly bored but nonetheless appreciative of this spectacle of colour and light, which was a difficult balance to achieve but they managed more or less.

And so the twilight chorus of birdsong slipped into the quiet of evening and darkness fell about Neji and Temari until they blinked and noticed that it was night. And neither of them made to move, even when the moon rose and the night creatures began their rustling in the Konoha undergrowth and there really was no excuse to keep sitting together any more.

And while he was sitting there next to Temari, Neji realized that there was something else that had been developing in ways akin to this hushed progression of nightfall, something else that had happened by movements slow and steady and secret. And this left him quite perturbed.

And while she was seated there next to Neji, Temari realized that there was something else that had, like the coming of dusk, actualized itself by calm purposive advancements which had gone completely unnoticed and unheeded by her until now.

And then Neji and Temari both understood that that something had been happening by unhurried degrees over the course of three weeks, as imperceptible as this present twilight's sinking into night.

And then they knew then that they didn't really hate each other or even just tolerate each other or stand each other or even just like each other a little bit but rather a whole lot.

It was falling a little bit in love.

Neji blinked.

And Temari blinked.

And the realization was a rush and it was a high and they found themselves feeling awkward and unfamiliar but also knowing suddenly that the fights and the insults and the shared tumbles and scrums had all been leading up to this, to sitting here together and almost touching and pretending that they weren't thinking about it. And it was inevitable and unpreventable and necessary somehow and that made everything all right.

Neji finally decided to put his hand not two inches away from Temari's or even one inch away but rather close enough that his fingers slightly overlapped hers, just to see what would happen. And Temari noticed this and instead of pulling back or yelling about personal space, she turned shifted hand so that their fingers interlaced, kind of.

And that seemed as good as time as any to Neji and so he nudged Temari and said, "hey."

And Temari turned and said, "what?" even though she already knew what.

And then they both sort of smiled and their eyes met and, two seconds after that, so did their lips.

VVVVVV

On the twentieth day, Neji and Temari said goodbye.

We will drop the curtain of privacy around them regarding the precise details of their farewell ceremony but we will mention that Neji proved beyond question that he was part carp when finally got a hold of those fishnetted legs and had his way with them. And we note too that, with regards to a particular article in Killer Kunoichi, as it turned out Neji wielded a katana and not a kunai, which satisfied Temari very much, and we mention too that his endurance levels turned out to be most pleasing and indeed almost too pleasing.

We remark also that Temari got very intimately acquainted with the deliciously thick pile rug of the Leaf bunkhouse and later with the jacuzzi and even later with the 400 thread black silk sheets and she considered writing a book called _The Adventures of Neji The Nudist Ninja_ which would be infinitely more exciting than the _Norman_ series because the protagonist would have a totally bodacious consort called Temari the Tantalizing Tart.

When they had quite finished frisking, frolicking and generally engaging in cross-village hanky-panky quite as outrageous as that of their bugs, Neji and Temari lay together sticky with sweat and other interesting bodily secretions and basked quite satisfied in post-hanky-panky afterglow.

Then Temari stretched and casually mentioned that maybe she would be swinging around to Konoha at some point and Neji looked up and just as casually invited her to stay at his place because someone had to keep an eye on her before she destroyed the village or something and they kind of agreed that yeah, that sounded like a good plan, but it was all very provisional and didn't mean anything or whatever. And Temari's hand disappeared under the sheets and started to do naughty things with Neji's katana and they were getting frisky again almost immediately.

And then they fell asleep nestled together in Neji's bed, but only because it was more convenient for Temari to stay there since half of her clothes were missing in action and her fishnets were ripped in the most scandalous places, and not because they had a profound heartfelt longing to remain together as long as possible maybe forever and till-death-do-us-part. Or whatever.

VVVVVV

On the morning of the twenty-first day, the bunkhouses stood empty once more – but only until the next disgruntled jounin pair made their way to them, grumbling about border duty.

Quiet anticipation made the air hushed and still on the little-used road between two bunkhouses on the border of Sand and Leaf.

VVVVVV

**A/N:** The end. Hope you enjoyed this little story! Writing it was a pleasure and hopefully reading it was fun too. Please see my profile for updates on my other fics.


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